Agriculture is undergoing a great transformation, often pronounced the fourth agricultural revolution, driven by technologies such as robotics, variable rate chemical applicators, the Internet of Things, big data, drones and automation (Balafoutis et al. 2020). This transformation is marked by the double pressure of a burgeoning world population, on the one hand, and evermore strained life-support systems, on the other (Blok 2017, 133). Life-support systems include both wild ecosystems and human food production systems. Protecting wild ecosystems is a demanding imperative. Even more demanding is the thriving of human food production systems, which must not only be protected from the pressures of population growth, but continue to facilitate this growth.

In recent years, the enhancement of agroecology with state-of-the-art technology has been heralded as the path out of the threefold wicked problem of doing less with more for human food production systems, while fostering biodiversity and natural habitats (De Schutter 2011; Wezel et al. 2020). Digital agroecology is seen, accordingly, as a way of overcoming many of the disastrous consequences of the third agricultural revolution by drawing on pre-industrial methods and practices and synthesising them with advanced technologies, thus increasing yields with reduced resources, while fostering better ecosystems (Maurel & Huyghe 2017). 
However, aside of pragmatic qualms concerning the feasibility of such aspirations and a host of ethical, political and economic barriers, the question emerges whether agroecology and the digital agricultural revolution are not drawing on different paradigms of thought and practice, indeed different “world-pictures.” Building on the work of Heidegger (2002), Lyotard (1991) and Neyrat (2019; 2021) the paper argues that the third agricultural revolution was premised on a “human ecology,” which constructs nature according to human needs. 

This world-picture persists in the fourth revolution and is countered by the agroecological emphasis on “non-human ecologies,” i.e. the ways that nature may flourish through the suspension of human intervention. The paper argues that the seemingly incompatible positions share the common horizon of nature’s “constructability” and explores the scope of an “inhuman” ecology which is not simply other to human, but rather what resist the human from within.