by Lin Zhang and Tu Lan
Zhang, L., & Lan, T. (2026). The data fix: Smart farming and the sociotechnical politics of datafication and assetization. Big Data & Society, 13(2).
As AI becomes the defining infrastructure of our moment, its footprint increasingly extends beyond cities and server rooms into production landscapes. Around the world, farmland is under growing pressure—not only from climate change and urban expansion, but also from the rapid buildout of data centers, digital infrastructure, and new forms of platform coordination. At the same time, agriculture itself is being transformed into a site of data extraction. Farming is no longer simply about producing food; it increasingly involves producing streams of data.
Much of the existing research on digital agriculture has focused on North America, where agricultural datafication unfolds through histories of settler colonialism, private property, and financialized land markets. In these accounts, data often operates as a mechanism of enclosure, speculation, and accumulation.
But what happens when land cannot be fully assetized, and where the financial market is heavily regulated?
In our recent article, we turn to China to explore this question. Drawing on fieldwork in the mushroom industry of Gutian, Fujian Province, we introduce the concept of the data fix: the use of data infrastructures to manage economic, social, and ecological contradictions under digital capitalism. Through an ethnographic case study of the expansion of the national agricultural digital brain project with Gutian’s mushroom farming as a pilot site, we explore the rise of data-human assemblage in agricultural labor and the changing land politics as the local state remobilizes resources to pivot towards the new data and AI economy.
Mushroom Digital Brain Platform on Display
Inside the Tremella Farming Factory
Rather than transforming farmland directly into speculative assets, China’s model—shaped by collective land ownership, state coordination, and platform experimentation—redirects datafication toward governance, visibility, and territorial management. This hybrid data governance cannot be reduced to either market transition or technological catch-up. We argue that contemporary Chinese agricultural datafication unfolds through tensions between residual socialist commitments to social and regional equity and renewed pressures for technological developmentalism and cybernetic futurity. In this sense, projects such as the Agricultural Digital Brain are not simply new infrastructures; they are also continuations and mutations of earlier post-reform experiments in governing through information, feedback, and technocratic coordination.
The result is not an alternative to digital capitalism, but a different pathway through it—one in which data becomes both an asset and a way of governing land, labor, and rural futures.
Young Generation of Farmers Selling Mushrooms via Social Media
