Who owns, who controls, who benefits?

The digitalization of agriculture is reshaping how knowledge, power, and value circulate within European agri-food systems. While digital tools promise gains in efficiency and sustainability, they also raise ethical questions about data ownership, control of digital infrastructures, accountability, and how benefits and burdens are distributed. Drawing on qualitative focus groups across 18 LLs in Europe, this paper examines how farmers, advisors, and policymakers interpret the environmental, economic, and social implications of digitalization, and how they assess them through justice, autonomy, trust, and governance. Digitalization is experienced not as a neutral technological development but as a contested socio-technical transition in which power relations, responsibilities, and agricultural knowledge are reconfigured. Participants voiced concerns about data extractivism, algorithmic opacity, dependence on proprietary platforms, surveillance risks, and widening inequalities across regions, generations, and farm types. At the same time, they identified opportunities for more inclusive trajectories through cooperative data governance, public-interest digital infrastructures, responsible innovation, and regulatory safeguards that enhance transparency and farmer agency. By foregrounding farmers lived experiences and moral evaluations, the paper advances a justice-oriented framework for assessing digital transitions, shows how data governance and platformization reshape ethical responsibilities, and outlines pathways for governing digital agriculture in ways that strengthen fairness, accountability, and democratic legitimacy. The analysis shows that the ethical acceptability of digitalization depends on governance choices that determine who owns, who controls, and who benefits from digital transformation. JEL Codes: Q16; Q18; O33; D63; L86