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Farmer Agency in Intelligent Agriculture: A Critical Interpretive Review of Automation, Platformization, and Participatory Design
Intelligent agriculture is increasingly shaped by automation, data platforms, decision-support tools, robotics, sensors, and algorithmic advisory systems. These technologies are promoted as ways to improve productivity, precision, efficiency, and sustainability in farming. Yet they also alter how agricultural decisions are made, who participates in those decisions, and whose knowledge is treated as authoritative. The central problem addressed in this article is that intelligent agriculture is often presented as a technical improvement while its implications for farmer agency remain contested. Farmer autonomy, judgement, dependency, skill, and voice can be strengthened by digital tools, but they can also be narrowed when systems become opaque, prescriptive, proprietary, or difficult to contest. This tension makes farmer agency a core question for responsible intelligent agriculture. This critical interpretive review examines how automation, platformization, and participatory design reshape farmer agency. It interprets agency not as an individual trait that farmers either possess or lose, but as a socio-technical capacity formed through relations among farmers, machines, platforms, data infrastructures, advisors, markets, and governance arrangements. The review therefore focuses on how agency is enabled, constrained, redistributed, and contested. The article examines key concepts, tensions, and assumptions in the reviewed literature. It does not report new primary empirical data, but critically synthesises existing scholarship to clarify how intelligent agriculture reorganises decision-making, knowledge, dependency, participation, power, and accountability. Particular attention is given to tensions between efficiency and autonomy, automation and situated judgement, platform convenience and dependency, data-driven advice and local knowledge, and participation and tokenism. The review argues that farmer agency is redistributed through socio-technical arrangements rather than simply preserved or removed by technology adoption. Responsible intelligent agriculture requires accountable automation, fair platform governance, participatory design, recognition of local knowledge, and institutional mechanisms that give farmers meaningful voice. Farmer agency should therefore be treated as a condition of technological legitimacy, not as an afterthought to innovation.
Journal of Intelligent Agriculture and Food Systems
Review | Open access | 15 March 2026 | Article: 32