I am currently in the middle of data collection, digging through Crunchbase finding Ag Data and Precision Ag companies. I have just about wrapped up California companies, finding and coding for 24 different companies. However, three of these companies were no longer active or difficult to find data for and four companies focused on something other […]
Time for Data Collection
This past week I have been collecting data and settling on interesting and doable methodology. My focus question is currently set as: To what extent have precision agriculture technologies been successful in achieving sustainable development goals in California and India? This question is driven by sustainable development goals and what current technologies are achieving. However, farming data […]
Concept Mapping – What’s In An Actor?
This week I dove into my first situated context: precision agriculture in California. Through this process I created an Actor-Network map: This really helped to organize my thoughts around California agriculture and got me to think about several actors and relationships that I need to research further. A big actor that has currently been mostly absent […]
Having Too Many Options – Thinking About Focus Questions
This past week I have spent a lot of time thinking about my focus question and possible research methods. Through this process, I am trying out several different question types and going to see what makes the most sense to go forward with. What are sustainable development values held for various future agriculture technologies? I […]
Learning From Past Projects and Finding a New Focus
Through continued research and looking at capstones from previous students I realized something critical: I am already feeling kind of bored with my capstone. I could go through the motions and have a fine capstone about the sustainable development impacts of artificial intelligence in rice agriculture in California and North India. But I can already […]
Finding Focus
After last week, I had a number different directions I could go with my capstone. Was I going to stay local or focus on a more on international agriculture? What sort of technology or crop, if any in particular, should I focus on? And how would I approach the impacts of the chosen technology? With […]
Playing With Place
For my capstone project, this week was all about situated contexts. Over the week, I tried out different framing questions, finally settling on: How can new technology adoption promote global sustainable development? With that framework set, it was time to play with place and see where I can go from my framing question. I chose three different […]
Starting a Capstone: Draft Outline
After years of working towards my concentration, it is finally time to bring everything together for my senior capstone. The first step is to write down everything that has been circling around my head the past several weeks and come up with an outline for my capstone. This “Madlib” exercise provides a pre-made outline, filled in […]
Agriculture Alternatives: Big Data
One popular alternative to the current political-economic landscape of food lies in bringing agriculture to the modern, technologically advanced age though big data. For agriculture, big data is just what it sounds like, collecting vast amounts of data from crop and weed locations, soil and weather conditions, and pesticide and herbicide use. There are several […]
Assessing Agricultural Applications of Synthetic Biology
Background Synthetic Biology is a new field of research that applies engineering principals to biological constructs (Policy 2014). In essence, it boils biology down to its genetic building blocks and rebuilds brand new cells through robotics or a DNA printer (Policy 2014). While related to genetic engineering, synthetic biology extends the focus to entire systems of genes […]