Digital from farm to fork: Infrastructures of quality and control in food supply chains

This paper considers the digitalisation of food infrastructure as a wider context within which smart farming and big data applications in agriculture are being introduced. It examines the use of digital devices aimed providing traceability and transparency across different sites of food supply chains, from farm to fork. The infrastructural perspective problematises ideas of digitalisation as a technological fix to the uncertainness of food supply chains, and highlights the relational nature of food. Digital devices aimed at ensuring food integrity and the control of supply chains are shown to reconstitute infrastructures of qualification by which the qualities of foodstuffs are established as they move through the processes of the supply chain, from production to consumption. The paper identifies question of power around the ongoing process of infrastructuring that generate a requirement for more labour by some actors; the possibility of new politics and relationships built around increased circulation of quality information; and questions of who controls access to information that are obscured by different understandings of transparency. •Digital connectivity in agriculture must consider wider supply chain.•An infrastructural perspective looks beyond digitalisation as a technological fix.•Digital traceability and transparency underpin ‘qualification’ of food.•Digitalisation reconstitutes infrastructures of qualification.•Digitalised infrastructures of qualification can highlight new power relations among food chain actors and consumers.