Data as Landed Property
Published in Leonardo
Authors: Daniela K. Rosner, Hanna Barakat, Jeffrey Basoah, Amelia Lee Dogan, Sucheta Ghoshal
With increasing investments in artificial intelligence (AI), new tools and strategies for plant cultivation have taken hold across agricultural industries, from smallholder farms to large-scale commercial enterprises. Examining emerging forms of Agrotech — the confluence of algorithmic computational systems and farming — reveals core tensions between profit-driven decision-making and agricultural knowledge lived and embodied in land-based relationships. This short essay analyzes interviews with 10 Agrotech developers and entrepreneurs, as well as marketing materials from their public-facing websites. Informed by this analysis, we argue that Agrotech sites reinforce the logics of private property in agricultural sites by turning land-based insights into data.
Recommended citation: Rosner, D. K., Barakat, H., Basoah, J., Dogan, A. L., and Ghoshal, S. 2026. Data as Landed Property. Leonardo. https://doi.org/10.1162/LEON.a.2732