Matt Comi won the 2021 Runners-Up for Environmental Sociology Early Career Prize
This article examines changes in the social world of farming, agricultural decision-making, and environmental outcomes in regions where precision agriculture (PA) techniques are increasingly commonplace. I suggest that a PA farmer does not typically appear as a discreet actor but rather as a ‘distributed farmer’: an assemblage of human and material participants which only together enact farming and decisions about farming. Drawing on qualitative data collected from on-site interviews with agronomists and seed sellers working in the US Midwest alongside a rich body of agri-food scholarship, this research posits that PA demonstrates the usefulness of this new theoretical unit for critically examining agricultural practices. Using the Midwestern PA case example, I show that studying relational flows interior to the distributed farmer is a generative way to further the discourse about farmer decision-making. Further, the distributed farmer is shown to be a useful theoretical tool when considering the social relationships between contemporary agricultural techniques and human values of environmental innovations. This article has implications for continued social science scholarship and for applied research supporting transitions to more sustainable and equitable agricultural practices in the US Midwest and many cognate geographies elsewhere in the globe.