This article traces the SDG process regarding the industrial agriculture and Agroecology, from vision, through goals to indicators; more precisely indicator 2.4.1: “Proportion of agricultural area under productive and sustainable agriculture”.

The papers in this special issue investigate the politics that shaped the SDGs, the setting of the goals, the selection of the measurement methods. The papers also highlight how the increasing role of big data and other non-traditional sources of data is altering data production, dissemination and use, and fundamentally altering the epistemology of information and knowledge.