The detrimental consequences associated with industrial models of food production are becoming more difficult to ignore. In response, one dominant approach to mitigating the myriad environmental, social, and ethical harms relating to food has sought to increase the efficiency of agricultural outputs through scientific and technological innovation. Although technology certainly has some role to play in any vision of a sustainable future, technocratic approaches to problem solving are insufficient—and arguably inappropriate—for addressing many of the kinds of complex challenges that we face today. There are recent indications that both agri-food law and policy and innovation policy are being taken more seriously in Canada, which creates an opportunity to reflect more deliberately on their ends and means. This dissertation explores the topic of how laws, policies, and other tools of governance can work to better align technological innovations in the agri-food sector with shared environmental goals and ethical aspirations. Taking a critical legal perspective closely informed by feminist insights and the work of existing, analogous justice movements, I examine several interlinkages between technology, law, the environment, and society to evaluate some of the failings of existing approaches to food systems transformation and to offer a contribution to the conversation about alternative pathways. Given the context-specific nature of food systems and food systems governance, my focus is primarily on Canada, but the universal importance of food in a globalized world renders some comparative and transnational discussion unavoidable. I use case studies and discourse analysis to demonstrate that, when considered through a justice-oriented lens, several of the new and emerging technologies being championed in the agri-food sector may not be as beneficial as their proponents claim. Instead, they may serve to retrench injustice and cement existing, exploitative power structures, making them more difficult to challenge and change later down the line. Thus, if technologies are to serve public instead of private interests in the ways they are incentivized, designed, regulated, and used, we will need to see broad systemic and structural reforms informed by thoughtful shifts in our values and priorities, rather than merely reactive adjustments to our policies and practices. Though this undertaking will be difficult, it is not impossible; this dissertation offers one way to facilitate the process of seeding change for environmental sustainability and technological justice.

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) has emerged as a concept to address the multiple challenges and interdependencies of agriculture and climate change. Within CSA debates, equity and agroecology are especially contested. In Ghana, the concept of climate-smart cocoa (CSC) has emerged to simultaneously respond to high rates of deforestation, climate change pressures and low productivity of cocoa – Ghana’s principal agricultural export. Since CSC in Ghana is a nascent concept, it has received very little academic or critical appraisal. By applying a meta-discourse framework, this study aimed at gaining insights into local CSC discourses in Ghana and how these reflect global environmental meta-discourses. The adoption of certain discourses can reveal insights into subsequent policies and their implications for already marginalised cocoa smallholders. My findings are based on 37 qualitative interviews with cocoa smallholders, extension officers as well as governmental, non-governmental and private sector representatives of Ghana’s cocoa sector. Overall, my results suggest that an ecological modernisation discourse was the most pronounced meta-discourse reflected within CSC. A sustainable intensification discourse was the most common CSC practice to achieve a win-win between environment and development aspirations. Agroecological practices within CSC were mainly adopted to serve ecological modernisation discourses and are thus diametrically opposed to those promoted by more radical meta-discourses. Issues of contextual equity, especially regarding tree tenure, were ubiquitous, and discussed by a large majority of cocoa stakeholders. I caution that an overly simplistic win-win approach risks side-lining contextual equity issues and complexities regarding shade cover and agrochemical input. Community Resource Management Area Mechanisms (CREMAs) and other local governance mechanisms represent promising ways to balance trade-offs within the dominant CSC discourse by giving cocoa smallholders a stronger voice. However, given the dominance of large agricultural actors – such as foreign chocolate companies – within the current political economy of Ghana’s cocoa sector, this study cautions not to overestimate the potential of these local governance structures.

The task of modeling and controlling the evolution of dynamical sys- tems is one of the main objectives in mechatronics engineering. When approaching the problem of controlling physical or digital systems, the dynamical models have been historically divided into continuous-time, described by differential equations, and discrete-time, described by difference equations. In the last decade, a new class of models, known as hybrid dynamical systems, has gained popularity in the control community because of its high versatility. This framework combines continuous-time and discrete- time evolution, thus allowing for both the description of a broader class of systems and the achievement of better-performing controllers, compared to the traditional continuous-time alternatives. After the first rigorous introduction of the framework, several Lyapunov-based results were published in the literature, and numerous application areas were shown to benefit from the introduction of a hybrid dynamics, like systems involving impacts or physical systems connected to digital controllers (cyber-physical systems). In this thesis, we use the hybrid framework to study different mechatronics-inspired control problems. The applications we consider are diverse, so we split the presentation into three parts. In the first part we further analyze a particular hybrid control strategy, known as reset control, providing some new theoretical guarantees, together with an application to adaptive control. In the second part we consider two applications of the hybrid framework to the network dynamics field, specifically we analyze the problems of distributed state estimation and of uniform synchronization of nonlinear oscillators. In the third part, we use a hybrid approach to study two applications where this framework has been rarely employed, or not at all, namely smart agriculture and trajectory tracking for a bipedal walking robot. We study these application-inspired problems from a theoretical point of view, giving robust Lyapunov-based stability guarantees. We complement the theoretical analysis with numerical results, obtained from simulations or from experiments.

京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(農学) / 甲第23964号 / 農博第2513号 / 新制||農||1093(附属図書館) / 学位論文||R4||N5399(農学部図書室) / 京都大学大学院農学研究科生物資源経済学専攻 / (主査)教授 梅津 千恵子, 教授 浅見 淳之, 准教授 三谷 羊平 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Agricultural Science / Kyoto University / DFAM

To strengthen societies and address the increased risks generated by climate change, development projects within disaster risk reduction [DRR] and climate change adaptation [CCA] must ensure the sustainability of capacity development. However, sustainability is currently flawed in such projects, which could relate to the inadequate achievement of empowerment of targeted beneficiaries. Some scholars suggest that vertical collaboration – the collaboration between stakeholders and beneficiaries – is decisive in determining the achievement of community empowerment during implementation. Still, the role of vertical collaboration and the dynamics of this relationship remains unexplored. By comparing a development initiative within climate-smart agriculture [CSA] implemented in two different communities in Eswatini, this thesis aims to evaluate the achievement of vertical collaboration and explore the relationship between vertical collaboration and empowerment. The results show that the achievement of vertical collaboration does covariate with the presence of empowerment and that certain factors are more influential in determining outcomes than others. These factors include the presence of opportunities for all participants to get involved; active, accessible, and participatory communication; bidirectional learning; and providing beneficiaries with voice and decision-making power. The findings support the theoretical argument, demonstrating that vertical collaboration plays a role in determining empowerment, and highlight the importance of considering it as a critical aspect when implementing CSA projects. However, the sustainability of capacity developments could not be identified in either community, suggesting that alternative factors might be essential for long-term outcomes. Further research is required to understand interconnections among identified factors and how they can be leveraged for the success and sustainability of capacity development within this field.

Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine Type Communication (MTC) have got more momentum in the last few years but still, need to be penetrated with their full swing in our daily life. This can be possible with general framework that provides global network coverage. Non-terrestrial networks comprised of satellites and aerial platforms are expected to provide next-generation communication services in underserved and un-served areas by ensuring the quality of service that cannot be covered by existing terrestrial networks owing to economical and geographical limitations. The aim of this thesis is to formulate a set of massive and critical MTC use cases such as global environment monitoring, tracking of shipping containers and smart agriculture, and assess their comprehensive requirements like data size, sensor node density and uplink capacity and discuss possible network architectures and deployments focusing on satellite or aerial networks. A rigorous discussion on different network architectures to address the requirements have been presented, that involve (1) Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite based network, (2) High Altitude Platform (HAP) based network, and (3) HAP and UAV based network. The proposed network architectures have been simulated and analyzed using MATLAB tools for respective use cases in terms of required number of satellites or aerial platforms. The criteria for selection of network architectures for the use cases are based on the minimum number of satellites or aerial platforms. The results show that LEO constellation consisting of 260 satellites are feasible concerning deployment and management for global environment monitoring network. Similarly, 1440 LEO satellites provide global coverage for tracking of shipping containers. Smart agriculture use case requires high throughput, and hence HAP and UAV integrated network architecture is more realistic for a fully autonomous system as compared to other network architectures. Cooperative control and management of set of agricultural machines can be performed at the UAV. Simulation results show that single UAV can be capable of commanding and controlling the agricultural smart machines in one square kilometer crop field and can send the summary of events to the central station via a HAP. / Internet of Things (IoT) och maskintypkommunikation (MTC) har fått mer fart under de senaste åren men måste fortfarande penetreras med sin fulla sväng i vårt dagliga liv. Detta kan vara möjligt med allmän ramverk som ger global nätverkstäckning. Icke- markbundna nät bestående av satelliter och flygplattformar förväntas tillhandahålla nästa generations kommunikationstjänster i undervärdiga och obetjänade områden genom att säkerställa kvaliteten påtjänster som inte kan täckas av befintliga marknät pågrund av ekonomiska och geografiska begränsningar. Syftet med den här avhandlingen är att formulera en uppsättning massiva och kritiska MTC-användningsfall som global miljöövervakning, spårning av fraktcontainrar och smart jordbruk, och utvärdera deras omfattande krav som datastorlek, sensornoddensitet och upplänkkapacitet och diskutera möjliga nätverk arkitekturer och distributioner med fokus påsatellit- eller flygnät. En rigorös diskussion om olika nätverksarkitekturer för att möta kraven har presenterats, som involverar (1) Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellitbaserat nätverk, (2) High Altitude Platform (HAP) baserat nätverk, och (3) HAP och UAV baserat nätverk. De föreslagna nätverksarkitekturerna har simulerats och analyserats med MATLAB-verktyg för respek- tive användningsfall i termer av det nödvändiga antalet satelliter eller flygplattformar. Kriterierna för val av nätverksarkitekturer för användningsfallen är baserade pådet minsta antalet satelliter eller flygplattformar. Resultaten visar att LEO-konstellationen bestående av 260 satelliter är möjlig när det gäller distribution och hantering för globalt miljöövervakningsnätverk. Påliknande sätt ger 1440 LEO-satelliter global täckning för spårning av fraktcontainrar. Småjordbruksanvändningsfall kräver hög kapacitet, och följaktligen är HAP och UAV integrerad nätverksarkitektur mer realistisk för ett helt autonomt system jämfört med andra nätverksarkitekturer. Kooperativ kontroll och hantering av jordbruksmaskiner kan utföras vid UAV. Simuleringsresultat visar att en enda UAV kan vara kapabel att kommandera och kontrollera jordbrukssmarta maskiner i ett kvadratkilometer grödningsfält och kan skicka sammanfattningen av händelser till centralstationen via HAP.

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Lite-Agro studies applications of TinyML in pear (Pyrus communis) tree disease identification and explores hardware implementations with an ESP32 microcontroller. The study works with the DiaMOS Pear Dataset to learn through image analysis whether the leaf is healthy or not, and classifies it according to curl, healthy, spot or slug categories. The system is designed as a low cost and light-duty computing detection edge solution that compares models such as InceptionV3, XceptionV3, EfficientNetB0, and MobileNetV2. This work also researches integration with federated learning frameworks and provides an introduction to federated averaging algorithms.

Landtechnik der Zukunft Die fortschreitende Digitalisierung betrifft sämtliche Lebensbereiche. Als Chance und Herausforderung zugleich geht es momentan darum auch in der Landwirtschaft Nutzen und Ziele zu definieren, Voraussetzungen zur Einführung zu schaffen und Anwender und Verbraucher auf dem Weg mitzunehmen. Die Veranstaltung Landtechnik der Zukunft, beleuchtete diese Themen am 23. Januar 2018 in der Vertretung des Freistaates Sachsen beim Bund in Berlin. Zukunftstechnologien und deren Praxisanforderungen wurden mit renommierten Referenten interaktiv diskutiert und auch dokumentiert. Szenarien einer digitalisierten und nachhaltigen Landwirtschaft gekoppelt mit aktuellen Ernährungstrends prägten die Veranstaltung, deren Teilnehmer querbeet aus Industrie, Politik und Hochschule kamen. Schwarmtechnologien wie auch die echtzeitfähige Funkvernetzung für Arbeitsmaschinen und -prozesse erzeugten viele Nachfragen, wobei Technikentwicklung im ökologischen Landbau und Technikentwicklung für Nachhaltigkeit aus der Sicht der Hersteller im Kern des Interesses waren.

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