In winter 2025, Associate Professor Madeleine Fairbairn co-authored “Digital agriculture will perpetuate injustice unless led from the grassroots” with Professor Maywa Montenegro for Nature Food, critiquing the corporate-controlled digital agriculture. Instead, the authors argue for innovation processes that center on the needs, knowledge, and priorities of communities who live and work in close relationship to the land.
She also published “Agrarian Platform Capitalism: Digital Rentiership Comes to Farming” in Antipode, which explores the growing scholarly interest in the rise of “platform capitalism.” Historically, this research has been largely focused on urban areas by looking at the impacts of Uber or Airbnb. In this article, the authors consider how platformization in agriculture is combined with the distinctive features of agrarian political economy to produce unique effects.