March 26, 2026
#30 Agrarian Platform Capitalism: Digital Rentiership comes to Farming
In this abbreviated version of an article originally published in the leading Radical Geography journal Antipode, Emily Reisman, Madeleine Fairbairn, and Zenia Kish offer insight into the theory and practice of Agrarian Platform Capitalism, showing how the Silicon-Valley model of entrepreneurship propels digital rentiership in agriculture. Notably, platforms exacerbate the financialization of farmland, take on pseudo-regulatory roles, and adopt populist rhetoric resonant with farmer’s economic precarity.
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Agriculture is increasingly run via digital platforms: from the e-commerce sites that connect buyers and sellers of farm inputs, to the farm management platforms that compile agricultural data for use by farmers and often third parties, to the farm real estate sites that connect investors and renters to land. Agriculture is not unique in this respect. Platforms – “programmable digital architecture designed to organize interactions between users… geared toward the systematic collection, algorithmic processing, circulation, and monetization of user data” [1] – now serve as the dominant infrastructure of the digital economy [2]. Platform business models have become increasingly common across economic sectors, leading scholars to theorize the distinctive features of an emergent platform capitalism [3]. Analyses of platform capitalism, however, have tended to focus on urban contexts – the ride-sharing, food delivery, and real estate platforms reshaping life in cities. Building on this scholarship, we ask: what is similar and what is different as platform capitalism increasingly sets its sights on farming?
Expanding the Array of Rentier Profits
One pervasive critique of the platform model is that it derives value primarily from rentier profits. As virtually unavoidable intermediaries in all manner of economic transactions and social interactions, platforms are able to extract rentier profits—income generated from scarce or monopolized assets [4], in this case the platform itself. Platforms effectively serve as toll collectors on the economic highways of the internet, collecting rents from the users who have no choice but to work through their sites [5]. Platform companies are particularly adept at generating rentier income because they have a strong tendency towards monopoly. This is in large part because platforms rely heavily on network effects [6]; [2]: the platform derives its power from the number of users, so the more quickly a company builds its user base the more useful it becomes. This creates a strong first mover advantage and steep barriers to entry for subsequent market players [7].
As in other industries, established agricultural firms are rapidly repositioning themselves to profit from the platform rentiership model. The four biggest transnational corporations in the agrichemical and seed business—Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, and Corteva—have all invested heavily in data analytics software platforms. While providing farmers with yield or disease information, these platforms serve to promote the company’s products, place third party advertisements, and create interlocking physical and technological systems which raise the cost of switching to a competitor’s products [8].
In addition to providing new types of rentier profits, platforms also offer novel ways of accessing a much more classic type of rent. A new generation of platform technologies such as AcreValue, CommonGround (formerly CashRent), and CamoAg (formerly Tillable) provide digital tools designed to assist remote landowners with property and tenant selection, making feasible rentier landownership on a far grander scale than would otherwise be possible
[9];
[10]. Many farmland platforms position themselves as an intermediary between farmland owners and financial service providers, facilitating the collection and transfer of data relevant for securing mortgages, insurance, or carbon payments. At the same time, farmland crowdfunding platforms such as AcreTrader, FarmFundr, and FarmTogether, enable investors to directly buy shares in operating farms. They are at the forefront of an effort to transform farmland into a financial asset class
[9], thus enabling “an unprecedented integration between finance capital and landownership that harkens back to previous eras of rentier control”
[11]. In this sense, farmland management is following broader trends common to urban property markets, which have seen the rise of “platform real estate”
[12] and the “automated landlord”
[13].
Not Only Evading, But Being Endorsed by the State
Platforms are also widely criticized for using their intermediary position to evade regulation, effectively outsourcing risks onto users, workers, vendors, subcontractors, and others outside the organization. Ride-sharing and other “gig” applications have refused to recognize their workers as employees
[14]. Similarly, social media platforms have resisted government oversight by claiming to be neutral content distributors rather than content producers
[15]. Platforms, in other words, use their intermediary role to create legal distance and absolve themselves of the basic liabilities ascribed to commercial enterprises
[16]. Platforms have also taken on governance-like roles by developing strategies that effectively “shift decision-making powers from elected bodies to private firms”
[7]. The “algorithmic management,” in which user behaviors such as ratings serve a managerial function, allows companies to not only deflect regulatory oversight but to take on regulatory functions themselves
[17]. In agriculture, platforms not only avoid regulation and exhibit governance-like functions, their adoption is in some cases actually incentivized by governments.
Food safety is one area in which we see this emergent platform governance. Technology giant IBM has launched a platform called Food Trust that boasts traceability and accountability for the agri-food supply chain via distributed digital ledgers (i.e. blockchain). IBM Food Trust describes participating companies as building brand trust by setting “their own independent standards and programs for food safety and freshness”
[18]. The goal for Food Trust, and similar efforts, such as the grain trading platform Covantis, is to bring together as many different actors and stakeholders as possible across supply chains into a single, privately owned digital infrastructure. Platforms such as Food Trust are poised to become more intimately intertwined with regulatory requirements. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) identifies platform-friendly technologies using blockchain and the Internet of Things as integral to their “New Era of Smarter Food Safety” strategy
[19]. Under the direction of a former Walmart executive well-known for promoting Food Trust, the agency announced more stringent federal requirements for tracking and reporting including tighter timelines
[20]. While not explicitly mandating digital record-keeping, the rule is expected to be a “tipping point” spurring widespread adoption of Food Trust or similar platforms
[21]. Of course, like the audit systems preceding them, such track and trace technologies do not address the structural factors of industrial production that give rise to food safety hazards
[22]. Since the 1980s, the US food safety regime has increasingly devolved accountability through a decentralized, preemptive, and technocratic system of public-private governance
[23]. Leaning on third party platforms for traceability reinforces this neoliberal trend.
Agricultural carbon markets offer additional evidence of how agricultural platforms take on governance-like roles and then become central to regulatory strategy. Rooted in the assumption that carbon offsets can be profitably sold to polluters, agricultural carbon credit platforms such as Indigo and Nori admit players to this new market space, validate their worthiness, and automate contracts. Nori even goes so far as to issue its own carbon removal-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a pseudo currency. Large agribusiness multinationals including Bayer, Cargill, and Nutrien are building their own carbon sequestration platforms, capitalizing on the opportunity to further secure their market power. Carbon credits are neoliberal concoctions par excellence
[24], designed to avoid the aggressive reduction in carbon emissions that only heavy regulation of industry could achieve while constructing new market infrastructures that favor corporations already locked into fossil fuel reliance
[25]. State regulation has been almost entirely absent in this sector. In May of 2024, however, the Biden administration promised government action to verify “high-integrity voluntary carbon markets” as it announced federal programs incentivizing carbon market participation
[26]. The state’s endorsement of carbon markets, despite decades of poor performance, underscores how platforms can settle into the spaces created by an anti-regulatory ethos and then make themselves indispensable to regulators.
Populism Beyond Consumer Convenience
While the growing prominence of platform companies has renewed interest in anti-trust legislation, scholars observe that this drive is often undermined by the populist discourse surrounding platforms. Populism, broadly construed, is a political orientation that positions “‘the people’ in a moral battle against elites”
[27]. Generally, populism pits regular people against large corporations. However, the popularity of many consumer-facing platforms has leant them a distinctly populist ethos. In strange contrast to monopolistic industries of the past, such as railroads and stockyards, however, there is often a strong alliance between platform owners and users, which can curtail efforts to regulate them (Rahman and Thelen 2019)
[6]. In California, for instance, where regulators forced ride-sharing companies to classify drivers as employees, the companies successfully persuaded voters that exempting ride-sharing from this law was in their best interest
[28]. This populist bent extends to agriculture, but it goes deeper than the consumer convenience evoked in other sectors. For farmers, populist platform rhetoric takes advantage of longstanding frustrations rooted in decades of economic precarity
[29];
[30].
The agricultural technology company Farmer’s Business Network provides a vivid illustration. Founded in 2014, the company courted farmers by aggregating data to show farmers that they had been paying more for seed than growers in other regions. The company argued they could “create transparency and power for the farmers”
[31], pledging their fealty to farmers by revealing how multinational agribusiness corporations had been taking advantage of them. This tactic resonated deeply with the frustrations of growers squeezed between the costs of highly concentrated corporate input suppliers and the low prices paid by highly concentrated commodity traders
[32]. By sharing data, FBN claimed that farmers could push back against such oligopolistic practices. In 2016 FBN launched an e-commerce farm supply business and in 2018 the company began selling generic equivalents of branded seed and agrochemical products alongside offerings from third-party sellers. FBN’s digital one-stop-shop features not only material goods but loans and insurance, with an expanding array of financial products including farmland investing tools, instruments allowing farmers to sell shares in the future value of their land, and reduced rate loans based on soil management. As the platform has grown, its oppositional stance towards corporate concentration is becoming harder to square with its business practices; in 2021 FBN announced a partnership with global grain giant ADM, a company emblematic of oligopolistic industry dominance. FBN’s growing alliance with finance and agribusiness reflect the importance of the rentier relation. Like Amazon, the business model centers on owning the digital real estate, with the company’s own products as secondary revenue streams.
Today’s agrarian platform populism is particularly striking given the historical position of agriculture in US populist movements. Rentiership was a focal grievance of US populism in the late 19
th century, when farmers and small businesses pitted themselves against a class of financiers, railroad magnates, meat packing tycoons, and other monopolists
[33]. Like these earlier corporate behemoths, today’s rising platform barons are gatekeepers extracting rents from businesses on all sides. Rather than fight the growing power of these digital gatekeepers however, FBN’s rapid growth signals that farmers may be willing to embrace them as allies when they appear to challenge oligopolistic agribusiness. As in other sectors, populist positioning has the potential to limit state interventions in agricultural platforms.
The Contested Futures of Agrarian Platform Capitalism
In setting out to understand how critiques of platform capitalism play out in the agricultural sector, we find many similarities as well as some distinctive dimensions. As in other industries, platforms expand the array of rentier relations surrounding farming, further enabling control of a vital social good—the provisioning of food, fiber, and fuel—by a small group of companies. They take on governance-like roles in structuring markets for food safety, carbon and the like, while becoming intertwined with regulatory agency operations. The appeal of populist discourse for farmers beleaguered by their industry’s entrenched oligopolies may paradoxically reproduce concentrated power by a new name.
We offer this initial characterization of agrarian platform capitalism as a starting point for charting the various formations, contestations, and implications of platformization for farming. Technologies are social phenomena situated in specific contexts and much work is needed to analyze the contours of each case. At present, we approach agrarian platform capitalism with critiques laid out in very different socio-economic circumstances. Will farmers push back against platformization, as some already have by, for instance, advocating for the right-to-repair or demanding data privacy standards? Will platform models transform farm labor as they have labor in other sectors, or does existing farmworker precarity leave little for platforms to exploit? What might the centrality of land, and its socioecological entanglements, reveal not only about platformization’s foul play but also its frictions? These inquiries are not merely a matter of rectifying the marginalization of the rural, but of deepening and situating our understanding of the platform configuration and its ascendant role in contemporary capitalism.
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