Ana Flavia Badue received a National Science Foundation Cultural Anthropology Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (CA-DDRIG) of $19,530 to conduct fieldwork for her dissertation research, “Financial Investments and Digital Technologies in Industrial Farming.”

In the past two decades, startup companies all around the world have deeply transformed everyday lives with digital technologies. Recent research has raised awareness to the multiple effects of these new businesses and the technologies they develop. They have impacted multiple sectors, such as the hospitality industry, transportation, logistics, and retail. Moreover, these startups work with venture capital and private equity, attracting aggressive investing behaviors. Although we typically associate these transformations in urban spaces, startups are now becoming important in the rural world. Agricultural startups develop software and hardware that promise farmers to increase their productivity, reduce environmental pollution, and create better working conditions. This research aims to investigate the impacts of startups and digital technologies on agricultural production, on economic transactions and on the everyday life of rural actors. Understanding contemporary agrarian transformations is critical for developing programs and policies that create balanced economic conditions. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology in scientific methods of rigorous data collection and analysis, the project would improve scientific understanding by broadly disseminating its findings to organizations invested in formulating policies around the use of digital technologies in the agribusiness sector.