“Innovation” has become a buzzword, often presented as a cure-all for every problem in food and farming
systems. Today, it has become synonymous with the rapid development of AI, precision agriculture, bioengineering, and automation. Yet innovation is deeply political, and reproduces specific systems of power. 

Agricultural innovations are shaped by particular social, ecological, economic, and political systems, and tend to reproduce the paradigms in which they were developed – whether extractive or inclusive; corporate-driven or farmer-led. What counts as innovative, whose knowledge matters, which solutions areconsidered appropriate, and who should benefit from agricultural innovations are all political choices. A powerful new alliance between Big Tech
corporations (including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alibaba) and Big Ag firms is rapidly gaining control of farming under the guise of innovation. These Big Tech titans are providing cloud platforms and AI-driven decision tools being integrated into all parts of industrial agriculture, from seeds to chemical inputs to machinery. As a result, they are shaping what technologies are developed, how food production decisions are made, and what the future of farming looks like.
 

Public institutions and private actors are investing billions in these Big Tech agricultural innovations –framed as indispensable for productivity, soil and crop health, labour, and climate challenges. But they are betting on the wrong model. Corporate-led digitalization of agriculture is failing to deliver ecological resilience, equity, or sustainability. Instead, it is deepening dependency on risky corporate schemes and locking agriculture into high-cost, high-energy, and high-input pathways. These innovation models tend to be extractive, expensive, polluting, and misaligned with farmers’ real needs. Big Tech and Big Ag firms are turning farmers’ knowledge and work into profit, while farmers
lose control over their own data. Digitalization is outsourcing farmer decisions to distant algorithms, with little accountability. Control over data is thus becoming a new source of power and profit in agriculture.

Continuing along this pathway risks leaving us with declining ecological resilience, rising farmer debt and bankruptcies, loss of rural jobs, erosion of farmer knowledge and autonomy, widening inequality between farms and between Global North and Global South countries, and shrinking democratic oversight over food systems.
At the same time, often hidden from view, farmers, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities are pioneering real innovations from the ground up. From ecological pest management approaches to peasant seed systems, these innovation systems are already delivering tangible benefits for climate resilience, biodiversity, livelihoods,
and local economies. Decentralized and grassroots innovation systems tend to prioritize affordability, adaptability, and repairability, while being grounded in local knowledge, lived experience, and collective learning. They recognize farmers, Indigenous peoples and local communities as innovators, ensuring their control. They work with rather than against ecological processes, are locally appropriate, and prioritize autonomy, resilience, diversity, and care – over
narrowly defined productivity and efficiency gains. Yet these innovation systems are systematically undervalued and underfunded. Public R&D, regulatory frameworks, and investment flows overwhelmingly favour corporate-led innovation models, sidelining approaches that are better aligned with farmers’ realities and ecological resilience.

Innovation systems can and must be reimagined to support just and sustainable food systems. We must talk about, fund, and govern innovation differently. We need to expand what counts as innovation, and shift who drives it.