Agricultural Prosumption: A Critical Perspective on Participation in the Design and Delivery of Digital Systems in the Agri-Food Sector

Digital technologies are increasingly promoted as participatory solutions to persistent challenges in agricultural development. This thesis critically examines how such participation reorganises digital extension systems. Drawing on the concept of prosumption and a design justice perspective, it analyses how farmers and intermediaries become co-producers of data, knowledge, legitimacy, and system maintenance, often without equivalent control or benefit. Three empirical chapters trace these dynamics across farmer-centred digital platforms in Kenya and the United States, and within a UK online farming community during Brexit. The findings show that participation can enable experimentation, peer learning, and political voice, while also shifting hidden work onto users, reinforcing epistemic hierarchies, and concentrating influence among better-resourced actors. The thesis conceptualises these dynamics through representational, distributive, and procedural forms of labour. It argues that participation alone is an inadequate measure of justice and calls for digital agriculture to be assessed through how benefits, recognition, and decision-making power are fairly distributed.

Eliot Jones,

The candidate of the PhD defence "Agricultural Prosumption: A Critical Perspective on Participation in the Design and Delivery of Digital Systems in the Agri-Food Sector".