Abstract
Excerpted From: Vasanthi Venkatesh, The Racialized Treadmill of Robotic Agriculture: Colonial Legacies, Legal Exceptionalism, and Labour Control, 23 Canadian Journal of Law and Technology 143 (March, 2026) (157 Footnotes) (Full Document)
Automation and digitization in agriculture are hailed as breakthroughs for food production. However, agricultural production in Canada and worldwide is rooted in violent displacement and land dispossession of Indigenous and Global South peoples, the suppression of traditional food systems, and the use of enslavement, indentureship, and racist immigration laws to supply unfree racialized labour for agriculture. Law has been a critical instrument for forging an extractive profit-driven food production regime -- by codifying enclosures and land expropriation, enabling agro-technological exploitation through subsidies and regulatory exemptions, insulating agricultural capital from accountability, and legitimizing racial labour exploitation. This article argues that emerging agricultural technologies do not disrupt these patterns. Instead, they intensify labour extraction and racial surveillance. Automation and digitization build upon and exploit the legal architecture founded on racial domination and colonial capitalist power. The new technologies are presumed to be inherently beneficial and framed as “progress” and innovation. This allows them to propagate without legal oversight, deepen the legal “exceptionalism” in agriculture, and amplify longstanding forms of racialized control and resource consolidation.
I argue that new technologies in agriculture are not revolutionary, and neither is the legal deregulation and impunity “exceptional.” They continue the colonial plantation system that dehumanizes, algorithmizes, surveils, and expropriates racialized people under claims of efficiency, food security, and modernity. The word “treadmill” in the title invokes this dual violence: first, the literal invention used as a racialized disciplining technology in plantations, and second, the economic concept that explains the systematic dispossession and wealth concentration occurring with the introduction of new technology in agriculture.
Drawing on law and political economy approaches, science and technology studies (STS), new plantation scholarship, and critical labour studies, this paper demonstrates how automated agricultural technology forms a regime of techno-capitalist enclosure. It does so through three interlocking logics: securitization, racial surveillance capitalism, and the plantation economy. Securitization reframes food production as an existential security crisis, mobilizing the language of emergency and urgency to justify surveillance systems, exceptions from various regulations including labour and privacy laws, and state-subsidized technological fixes for oligarchies. The techno-zeal in agriculture also rests on a neo-Malthusian, necropolitical discourse that drives white techno-supremacist agricultural nationalism. It constructs scarcity panic and demographic alarmism to frame racialized and global south populations as existential threats, requiring aggressive transnational, border, and domestic enforcement. It further legitimizes technological and agricultural exceptionalism, while intensifying economic and extra-economic coercion of racialized bodies, rendering them as a disposable, expropriable, and exploitable surplus.
Enthusiasm for agro-technology also justifies “surveillance capitalism”, explained by Shoshana Zuboff as a hyper-scaled extraction regime that commodifies human experience into behavioural data. It bypasses democratic oversight through regulatory capture and subsidies, and enforces mass behavioural manipulation, transforming life itself into a privatized surplus for capital accumulation. Simone Browne notes that racial logics, specifically anti-Blackness, shape the infrastructure and technologies of surveillance. She convincingly demonstrates that surveillance techniques used today are rooted in methods developed during plantation slavery. As Katherine McKittrick emphasizes, the plantation is not just a historical site, but a mobile necropolitical system of racial violence and unfree labour structuring our contemporary environment and economic, spatial, and social structures. Scholars have shown that the plantation was a “synthesis of field and factory”. It is the foundation site for capitalist efficiency, calculative management, and labour objectification that are reflected in algorithmic surveillance and new forms of Taylorism (atomization of work and labour for maximum efficiency and managerial control) in modern “smart” workplaces. This paper builds on the plantation complex as an analytic by foregrounding how law structures unfree labour, surveillance, and racialized dispossession within emerging automated and “smart” agricultural systems in Canada and globally.
This paper posits a historical continuum between colonial plantation technologies and those of the contemporary corporate farm, arguing that this link is scaffolded by legal exceptions. The first section maps the political economy and racial underpinnings of two paradigmatic technologies -- precision agriculture and high-tech greenhouses -- demonstrating how they modernize the plantation’s core features: exploited, unfree labor; pervasive racialized surveillance; and algorithmic management. The second section historicizes this argument by tracing these techno-logics to their roots in the colonial “plantation complex”. It shows how the contemporary legal regime of agricultural exceptionalism emerges from the “rule of colonial difference”, where the colonies in the “periphery” were treated as zones of legal exception. Finally, the third section grounds this analysis in Canada. It outlines how three interlocking legal exceptions maintain the contemporary plantation complex: (1) immigration laws that supply unfree racialized labor through border securitization and differential rights for non-citizens; (2) agricultural exceptionalism that exempts the sector from labor and environmental standards under the pretext of food security; and (3) a philosophy of technological determinism that justifies the deregulation of agricultural technology and shields it from oversight.
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From land grabs to labour camps, from combines to AI-driven greenhouses, the tools may change, but the logics endure. Science and technology have long been central to agricultural systems, playing a critical function in the colonial era, where they were instrumental in establishing and perpetuating the global “racial plantation complex”, marked by mass commercial agricultural productivity through the displacement, exploitation, and control of the labour of enslaved and indentured workers. The data-driven oversight, regimentation, and algorithmic management of labour that originated during this time persist in the practices of agricultural management to this day.
The logic of racialized labour control is embedded in these technologies, including in precision agriculture, the use of robotics and drones, and greenhouse technologies. In fact, the adoption of robotic technologies and greenhouses has increased racial dispossession of land globally and heightened worker surveillance. Precision farming, supported by data analytics, enables farm managers to make detailed decisions about when, where, and how to deploy labour and technology, effectively managing the workforce as an extension of the machines themselves. Drones and other surveillance-based technologies play a critical role in reinforcing the subordination of racialized populations within a broader system of technological control, blurring the boundaries between agricultural labour, border surveillance and militarization.
Legal “exceptionalism” in agriculture and migrant work has its roots in the colonial plantation economy, where law and technology were specifically structured to reinforce racialized labour exploitation and land dispossession. The regulatory framework is crucial in reinforcing the “technological treadmill in agriculture,” where new technologies lead to capital consolidation and increased monopolization for the benefit of Big-Ag and “Food Barons”. The legal and technological ecosystem is thus not truly “exceptional” but rather a banal and necessary part of the systems of power first forged in the colonial plantation complex.
The systemic harms outlined demand intervention and social change that explicitly centers racial justice, radical resistance, and decolonial frameworks. Without a redistribution of power and a rupture in the legal-political frameworks that exalt agriculture and technology, technologies meant to modernize farming will deepen the colonial and racial exploitation. The path forward requires a fundamental reorientation -- replacing the logic of extraction with one of reparation and liberation for those historically and currently dispossessed and exploited. It requires dismantling agricultural exceptionalism and redirecting policy from protecting corporate interests towards guaranteeing the dignity and rights of land and labour.
Dr. Vasanthi Venkatesh is Associate Professor in Law, Land, and Local Economies at the University of Windsor, Faculty of Law
