Adopt appropriate technology, albeit with skepticism
One of the primary reasons I chose a two-wheel tractor over a small Kubota for my 10-acre homestead was that a BCS contains zero microchips. I’m no mechanical genius, but I can utilize YouTube to my strategic advantage in order to learn how to replace a clutch or fix a carburetor. However, I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to fix electronics or hydraulics — which are more likely to break than the other components of a tractor — and so I went with the simpler technology.
The technological revolutions of the past several centuries — not to mention the past two decades — have transformed many aspects of life, including agriculture. Those of us in the regenerative farming space are bound to feel the tension of wanting to adopt technologies that make our work and lives simpler while simultaneously embracing the ancient wisdom of living in tune with nature. My argument is that it is indeed possible to find this balance, but the keys to doing so are erring on the side of simplicity and being very thoughtful about what we do adopt.
We should acknowledge from the outset that modern regenerative farming — even for those operations on the smaller end of the spectrum — is already fairly high-tech. Consider regenerative grazing. In order to farm more in tune with nature, we seek to emulate the practices of the huge herds that used to roam the fields and plains of North America. We used to do this with a very simple technology — horses and cowboys. This was replaced with miles and miles of expensive barbed wire, which made grazing patterns less natural. Today, many grazers leverage electrified single-strand polywire and buried plastic pipes. These technologies are far simpler than, say, smartphones, but they’re way more advanced than what they replaced. By and large, I would argue, they are a scale-appropriate technology.
But not every new invention is quite as obviously wise as polywire. The question we all need to ask ourselves is which technologies are wise to adopt for our specific farm’s context. How might a new technology not only improve our operational efficiency but lead to new challenges?
Let’s examine the potential downsides of new technology, particularly these three: that new technology makes us less resilient by making us more dependent on outside entities, that the connectedness of modern devices presents security risks, and that new technology can work to undermine community.
Even the most mundane modern technologies require repair parts and pieces that individuals generally aren’t going to be able to manufacture themselves. In one sense, this is market capitalism at its best — no one person knows how to mine and manufacture the lead, wood, aluminum and rubber required for a simple pencil, not to mention the components of a modern smartphone. If you decide you want to stick with tractors from the ’80s because they don’t have microchips, you’re still going to be dependent on a parts dealer.
But this problem is different in kind from being reliant on a company for the software that’s required to run a modern tractor. Good farmers already have to be proficient bookkeepers, biologists, chemists and mechanics; very few are going to be expert software technicians as well.
This of course gets into the right-to-repair debate. Personally, as evidenced by what I’m writing here, I’m more concerned that people make well-thought-out, wise decisions about what technologies they choose to adopt than in new regulations about what corporations can and can’t do. In fact, I’d venture to say that the current proposed legislation about right to repair is trying to correct problems caused by government’s overinvolvement in the agricultural system in the first place.
Manufacturers often do provide equipment owners the opportunity to access the more complex aspects of the software — they just require owners to pay for it. Some owners seek to get around this by purchasing cheaper, unlicensed software to do this, often from overseas. This gets to my second point: security concerns.
I held a security clearance for 20 years and did tours at several intelligence agencies, specializing in nuclear counterproliferation. I can attest that there are plenty of reasons to be concerned about cybersecurity. Read some of the recent releases about Chinese efforts to collect information about U.S. persons and U.S. infrastructure (as well as their own citizens), which they then put in massive databases and analyze via artificial intelligence. These reports should be taken seriously. All a malicious cyber actor needs to be able to do is disrupt (not collect in order to analyze — a more demanding type of operation). There is good reason to be exceedingly cautious about allowing your farm operation to become reliant on technology that could be disrupted by a malicious outside entity — not to mention by a natural event such as a large solar flare.
Lastly — and coming back down to earth — how does the adoption of new technology support our local societies? Consider the principle adhered to in the Plain community: to only add new technologies when they don’t work to drive us apart from one another. Automobiles aren’t inherently evil; owning them certainly allows people to live farther away from each other, though, thus weakening the bonds of the community.
The extrapolation of this principle in row-cropping is that larger and more complicated tractors enable — and by their price tag, necessitate — farming more and more land. This inevitably weakens rural communities, because a given amount of land no longer requires as many supporting laborers; whoever isn’t needed moves away, and the community shrivels.
This type of farming is not going to stop, and I’m not arguing that it must (and certainly not that government should try to do something about it, other than to stop propping up the current system through subsidies). I’m just saying that individuals should be open-eyed about how technology affects us and should make personal decisions on what to adopt with clear principles.
We need to regain a proper appreciation for who serves whom. Consider a smartphone app to help with crop scouting. Should the software assist a human to do the job — perhaps by providing an easy-to-use platform for data collection and management — or should it do the job for the human through large-scale analysis of overhead imagery and other sensors, overseen by data engineers in far-away windowless office buildings? The answer is perhaps even some combination of the two; we just need to make sure that we’re never dehumanized in our quest to utilize more and more technology.
I’m certainly not a paragon of wisdom in all my technological choices, but I do think that farming with a two-wheel tractor keeps me well grounded — figuratively and literally. The problem isn’t the technology itself — it’s that we too often adopt technology unquestioningly.
Paul Meyer is the editor of Acres U.S.A. magazine.
