When robots meet weeds: Mechanical–digital hybridity and ecological entanglements in digital agriculture

A major challenge for sustainable agriculture is finding alternatives to herbicides, which contribute to biodiversity loss and health risks. While digitalization is often presented as the solution to “the weeding problem,” this article untangles how digitalization is changing human–machine–nature interactions in the case of digital weeding technology. Building on critical theory of technology and Science and Technology Studies (STS), we analyze the histories of these technologies and their grounded interactions with nature and humans. Our findings challenge dominant narratives of “Big AgTech” by revealing that digital weeding is largely driven by mid-sized family corporations and specialized startups, creating a distinct mechanical–digital hybridity. We demonstrate that “precision” is not a stable technical property but an emergent outcome of interactions between mechanical tools, nature's materiality, and local farming contexts. Furthermore, while these technologies may create new dependencies on proprietary software and mapping services, they simultaneously challenge findings on “digital Taylorism” by potentially improving work quality for tech-savvy employees. Moreover, we uncover affective dimensions of human–robot relations—farmers naming robots and treating them as animal-like co-workers—that shape technology adoption in ways overlooked by current literature. Ultimately, we argue that understanding agricultural digitalization requires moving beyond data-extractive models to account for the messy, affective, and ecological entanglements of working farms.