Advances in Smart Farming and Big Data applications have the potential to help agricultural industries meet productivity and sustainability challenges. However, these benefits are unlikely to be realised if the social implications of these technological innovations are not adequately considered by those who promote them. Big Data applications are intrinsically socio-technical; their development and deployment are a product of social interactions between people, institutional and regulatory settings, as well as the technology itself. This paper explores the socio-technical factors and conditions that influence the development of Smart Farming and Big Data applications, using a multi-level perspective on transitions combined with social practice theory. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 26 Australian grain farmers and industry stakeholders to elicit their perspectives on benefits and risks of these changes. The analysis shows that issues related to trust are central concerns for many participants. These include procedural concerns about transparency and distributional concerns about who will benefit from access to and use of “farmers’ data”. These concerns create scepticism about the value of ‘smart’ technologies amongst some industry stakeholders, especially farmers. It also points to a divergence of expectations and norms between actors and institutions at the regime and niche levels in the emerging transition towards Smart Farming. Bridging this divide will require niche level interventions to enhance the agency of farmers and their local networks in these transactions, and, the cooperative design of new institutions at regime level to facilitate the fair and transparent allocation of risk and benefit in farming data information chains.

智能农业和大数据应用程序的进步有潜力帮助农业行业应对生产力和可持续性挑战。但是，如果促进技术创新的人们没有充分考虑这些技术创新的社会影响，那么就不可能实现这些收益。大数据应用本质上是社会技术的。它们的开发和部署是人，机构和监管环境以及技术本身之间的社会互动的产物。本文结合社会实践理论，从多层面的角度探讨了影响智能农业和大数据应用发展的社会技术因素和条件。我们对26位澳大利亚谷物农场主和行业利益相关者进行了半结构化访谈，以征询他们对这些变化的收益和风险的看法。分析表明，与信任有关的问题是许多参与者关注的中心问题。其中包括对程序透明度的关注，以及对谁将从“农民数据”的访问和使用中受益的关注。这些担忧使一些行业利益相关者（尤其是农民）对“智能”技术的价值产生了怀疑。它还指出，在向智能农业过渡的过程中，政权和利基级别参与者和机构之间的期望和规范存在差异。弥合这种鸿沟将需要利基水平的干预措施，以增强农民和他们当地网络在这些交易中的代理权，并且，