4 - Agriculture, End to End

Summary

Chapter 4 integrates the economic and legal discussion in the broader technological system and its evolution that ultimately frames its direction. Agriculture consists of a process for converting energy and biological information into physical products for human consumption. The ongoing consolidation of biotechnology and agricultural analytics into a handful of massive multinational corporations clearly illustrates this definition of agriculture as a process of information flow. The architectural ideal in information science is the ‘end-to-end’ principle. All intelligence within an information platform arises from its ends; either with its originators or with ultimate consumers, or, as so often happens in an interactive age, with consumers who themselves become second-order creators of content. The corollary of the end-to-end principle, however, is that physical and logical layers, which facilitate the transmission of intelligence become ‘dumb pipe’; effectively their sole contribution to this chain consists of efficiently transporting the relevant information.