Early in the morning I was paging through one of the farm magazines that pile up this time of year. I came to a photo of a driverless tractor. Case IH is calling it a concept vehicle. All the equipment companies are experimenting in this brave new world. I sent the photo out to some friends with the comment, “I guess I’ll be looking for work pretty soon.”
I have spent a large share of my career driving a tractor. It’s mildly disconcerting to see something you know so well, only you’ve been cut out of the picture. The tractor is an odd-looking beast. When you remove the cab from a tractor, it begins to look like an animal without a head.
This is not a surprise to us farmers. There have been tremendous leaps in agricultural technology over the last decades, and this one is predictable. With the combination of GPS, auto-steer, and guidance systems, the driverless tractor is a logical next step. Almost assuredly, you will see a driverless tractor in a field near you soon.
There are “early adapters” as technology moves out of the lab and on to the farm. I am not one of them. I still actually steer my tractor. That puts me in the minority of farmers right there. My rows still have embarrassing wobbles in them. The wobbles might indicate taking a sip of water or checking my phone. Regardless, I can see my dad Sylvester shaking his head from the beyond.
It humbles me to have to admit that the neighbor’s rows are straighter than mine. Those straight rows may be mostly cosmetic, but auto-steer does point to the future. In that future, there is no doubt a next-generation farm operator can be more efficient than me. I could make a go of it partly because I’ve put off purchases and used my labor instead, farming on the cheap. But as modern machinery investments get spread out over thousands of acres, my advantage slips away.
Even if I’m a “non-adapter,” I can’t help but be impressed by the possibilities. Drones will go out and relay information about crop condition, weeds, insects, and diseases. Then precise amounts of fertilizer and pesticides can be applied exactly where it is needed and no more. The environmental benefits are apparent.
What happens to labor requirements on farms in this rapidly approaching future? The answer to that is obvious. A farm operator with a few workers and the capital to purchase top of the line technology will literally be able to run a county. Or two.
Of course, it wasn’t always so. Go back just a few generations, and there were families working on 160 acres all across the middle of this continent. Big families had an advantage because there were more workers.
A century ago, it took twenty hours of labor to produce a hundred bushels of corn. Today, that might be down to minutes. There aren’t many of us who would choose to go back to live and work on a farm in 1917. It was tough, physically demanding work, dirty. Often it was dangerous. In addition, it wasn’t that lucrative. For most of our nation’s history, farm families accepted twenty per cent less income than workers in the city.
For all of that, there was something unique and worth commemorating about what we had in the United States. Our ancestors, really, most people who ever lived on this planet, wanted nothing more than a place of their own to live and work and raise a family. Being able to own a piece of land was something generations wished for but few were given the opportunity. For most of human history, land belonged to the pharaoh or king or whoever held power.
When America came to be, there was a whole continent to divvy up. (That is if you ignore the Native people who were here, which is no small matter.) For all its flaws, America offered a chance to live on a piece of land that the worker owned. Thousands of families spread out across our nation, both citizens and landowners. They had a stake in the land, which meant they had a stake in the future.
Again, it was not perfect. There are myriad stories of abuse, alcoholism, and dysfunctional families on the frontier. It was not perfect, but it many ways it was as close to perfect as human society has come. Now, we are giving that up.
There is little doubt that less and less people will be needed in this future of driverless tractors. It is part of the American story that the economy is always churning, ever changing. Jobs constantly become obsolete.
I was talking with a few friends around my age who farm. All of us grew up on the diverse labor-intensive farms of a half century ago. Those were places where manure making its way from barn to field usually got there aided by a pitchfork. Weeds were often pulled by hand. Feed for livestock was shoveled or baled. There was work for a whole family and then some.
A couple of us have a son or daughter interested in the farm, but nothing very settled. As we imagine the future of our farms, it’s hard not to see drones and driverless tractors in them. But not so much a farmer. If a next generation is going to work these farms, it probably will require an off-farm job. Or perhaps it will mean joining somehow into one of the larger operations.
But as we head down that path, it’s good to remember where we came from. We will continue to produce food in these fields that surround us. It will be with less labor, and it will be efficient. But it won’t be the same.