Farmers are increasingly owned by their tech; the only sane response is ecological agriculture
I’m no longer a “young farmer.” I’ve seen a lot in my lifetime — oil embargoes, market crashes, the dollar disintegrating and the slow-motion collapse of industrial civilization disguised as progress. But nothing made my gut twist like hearing an interview recently with a panel of investment managers as they discussed autonomous weapons systems and the death spiral of AI-run warfare. It happened on the same day that I learned that all of my credit cards and personal banking information had been hacked, drained and frozen. I’m still working to recover from all of this.
These aren’t fringe ideas or rare occurrences anymore. I know of three others hit in the same attack. The Zombie Drone Apocalypse isn’t science fiction anymore — it is happening in Ukraine and could easily happen elsewhere. This is the way that geopolitics will unfold in the 21st century; this is also the future of profits — AI is the sector into which most of the money is gushing.
Those of you who are techno-utopians might as well forget the Disneyland dream of cute little robots helping to organize your garage. The industrialized nations are manufacturing “autonomous kill chains”: drone swarms guided by emotionless code — decision loops with no human conscience. Satellites have already surveilled every meter of the planet and continues to do so. In August, Space X announced the launch of a deadly disease propagation laboratory into space — all in the name of “peace,” “national security,” “health care research” and, of course, profits. AI’s real destiny may not be to flip burgers, or to work in manufacturing, or to weed California’s strawberry fields, or make our lives easier … but to flip the kill switch.
But here’s a truth that mainstream analysts, think tanks, and the Silicon Valley profiteers won’t tell you: the antidote to centralized AI tyranny is internet-disconnected, decentralized ecological sovereignty.
This starts with land. Your land. Farmland. Clearcuts. Forgotten scrub lots. The kind of places Wall Street doesn’t want to touch — until they need food, water and resilience, which fewer than 1 percent of Americans (that’s you and me) know how to provide.
Technocratic Sharecropping
The AI revolution is roaring to life at increasing speed. One major effect is on the white-collar workforce. Software engineers, analysts, and graphic designers aren’t necessarily all being fired, but very few new ones are being hired. Why? AI doesn’t take breaks. It doesn’t unionize. It never asks for maternity leave.
AI’s effect on information and the way we think is even greater. People who are glued to their phones — most of society — don’t even know what’s real anymore. The information we get is curated for us, and we’re addicted to looking at it every idle moment.
So too, unfortunately, in the farming sphere: AI is everywhere. AI is destroying the farmer’s personal relationship with the land, the soil and the livestock. Everything is an up-to-the-minute report from the pocket, based on some algorithm developed in California or China. What happens when the information doesn’t mesh with reality on the ground? Those chasing the techno dream won’t even know when this happens — the bot tells us what to believe.
Fertility, pest and disease control, and soil management are all governed by algorithms that are optimized for one thing: efficiency. Not ethics. Not ecology. Just outcomes. Cash-flow for someone other than you.
And what’s the outcome? Profit over people. Precision-guided disregard for ecology. Dependency on the state and on proprietary corporate technologies.
Look at what the government and these corporations are pushing on farmers: total AI farms, automated tractors and drone-sprayers. Don’t forget that this precision ag is powered by the same intelligence that runs wars. It’s efficient, sure. But what happens when that system crashes, gets hacked, or is designed to fail, and then they charge you to fix it? What happens when your overleveraged technology is rendered obsolete one season later while your loan on the same tech has another seven years to go? What happens when the “smart” ag system collects all the information it needs in order to render you obsolete?
This isn’t farming. This is technocratic sharecropping. Farmers are increasingly owned by their tech.
The Only Sane Response: Perennial Power
Walk away from Rome! Plant trees!
I mean it. Plant chestnuts, hazelnuts, apples, elderberries, walnuts, pecans, pawpaws, oaks, persimmons, mulberries, mesquite, honey locusts, and more — trees and shrubs that live for centuries, build soil, resist drought, and create food, fuel, and fodder without synthetic inputs or digital babysitting.
What I’m talking about is Restoration Agriculture. Water-managed, deeply diverse agroforestry systems with animals integrated into the mix. A regenerative, perennial-based farming system that mimics the savannah. Not necessarily the “forest,” but more than the prairie — a system that is partially shaded but fully lit by the sun. This is the temperate zone’s sweet spot: a balanced expression of biodiversity and productivity.
This is the system I’ve used and helped build for decades on degraded farmland and clearcut timber lots around the world. You start with what nature gives you, and you let succession do the heavy lifting. You use tools — hand tools, laser-levels, earthworks, a chainsaw or a sawmill — but you never become dependent on any tool you can’t fix with a file, a wrench, or a couple of neighbors. You avoid technological systems that are under the control of others or of a data center.
Tech vs. Tool: Choose Wisely
There’s a massive difference between a tool and a technology. A tool is a humble thing. A hoe. A plow. A skid steer. Something you can understand, use, maintain and walk away from. Technology — especially digital, AI, or automated — is a system of dependency.
The tech bros can’t control your broadforks and wheel hoes. They can’t regulate your solar fence charge, your polywire and your guard dog. They can’t charge you a monthly subscription for your pruning shears and bushel baskets and root cellar.
Let me be blunt: if your farm runs on a smartphone app and satellite imagery, with field stations gathering all of your information, then you don’t own a farm — you rent a sensor array, and you are only as free as your masters allow. They can shut you down whenever they want.
But if you own trees rooted in a system that sequesters carbon, builds mycorrhizal networks, and produces staple foods year after year — now you are an interactive part of an ecosystem: a living, regenerative, scalable system powered by sunlight, air and water.
Zombie drones aren’t interested in systems like this. The Fed can’t inflate it. Wall Street can’t short-sell it.
Between now and when the Zombie Drone Apocalypse actually begins, I’ll still use my tractor, my forage stalk roller-chopper, my laptop and my smartphone — but I’m less and less interested in being owned, surveilled and manipulated by technological systems. When Babylon falls, may there be oases of ecological farms worldwide from which human beings may once again emerge to spread abundance.
How to Start: From Clearcut to Food Forest
Think clearcuts are wastelands? Think again. They’re actually perfect starting points for ecological agriculture. The timber’s already gone. The competition for degraded real estate is low. The soil is disturbed, and the place is a mess — but that just means you have a head start on succession. Disturbance has occurred, and site recovery is about to begin on its own. You now get to work WITH nature and steer your site in the same direction as the natural forces of recovery.
Step one: Design to manage runoff and other surface water. Swales & berms, terraces & mounds, ponds and pools. Do whatever it takes to capture water, direct it to where you want/need it, store it to use later, and deliver it to your crops or livestock. It’s not legal to harvest rainwater in your part of the country? My ancestors had a party on a ship in Boston Harbor, then went to war over an onerous tax on tea. Water is essential for life. It’s the primary nutrient in your system, whether you’re living in Iowa, Nevada or Alaska. If you don’t get the water right, you might not get a second chance. Damn the tea — full speed ahead.
Step two: Plant the backbone. Chestnuts. Hazels. Apples. Mulberries. Nitrogen fixers. Medicinals and other staple-food-producing woody crops. Design your alley widths to accommodate livestock, mowers, and harvest and hauling equipment. Think access. Think longevity. Think multiple income streams stacked onto the same ecosystem.
Step three: Integrate livestock. Cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, bees. Move them in such a manner as to improve pasture quality and to let the pastures (and trees!) recover. Disturb the site, fertilize the site, and regenerate. Animals are not an afterthought. They are the nutrient recyclers and maintenance department maintaining the biological solar engine.
Step four: Harvest intelligently. Do so in such a manner as to improve future yields. Thin your carrots. Thin your trees. Sell what’s in abundance. Every part of a plant is marketable in some way, shape or form. Ferment the sugars. Press the oils. Process the fruits and nuts, and feed the damaged or misshapen crops to the animals. Preserve and store the surplus. Make cider. Add value. Build micro-enterprises. Hire and trade with neighbors. Grow community. This is the ultimate anti-fragile model.
Ecological Resilience Is Economic Resilience
Now let’s talk dollars. You can buy degraded land for pennies on the dollar. Why? Because no one knows what to do with it. But restoration agriculture — ecological agriculture — flips the script.
Instead of annual inputs, you’re building endogenous fertility. Clover plowdowns. Mulched alleyways. Trees that fertilize. Fungi that turn wood into a meat equivalent — and eventually soil. The more mature your system gets, the less it needs you.
You aren’t buying seed every year. You aren’t importing fertility. You’re producing it in situ, right on the land. That’s not just sustainability — that’s sovereignty! It places you in a position of generosity. You can now help your neighbors to survive the Zombie Drone Apocalypse instead of having to fight against them.
Over time, a restoration-agriculture system yields multiple cash crops, vegetables, nuts, fruit, pastured meat, mushrooms, firewood and sawlogs. More than that, your newly restored food-producing ecosystem yields freedom. Freedom from global supply chains. Freedom from the cancer-causing chemical companies, Freedom from mind-numbing government reporting. Freedom from the false security of government subsidies. Freedom from zombie drones and AI masters.
Nature works! All by itself. No external inputs needed. It always has and always will. Has gravity ever failed you?
Final Thoughts: The Enemy Is Dependency
You desperately need to understand this: the future the tech companies are designing doesn’t include you.
It includes completely automated vertical farms, fake meat vats engineered by Alphabet-soup-backed startups, and war zones managed by AI generals who kill your sons and daughters and never sleep. It includes drone swarms patrolling rural America, digital IDs tracking your fertilizer usage, and subsidies that punish anyone who grows outside the synthetic loop of patented seed, GMOs, proprietary formulas, and “exclusive technologies” that don’t perform quite the way you need them to with a subscription automatically billed to your genetic code every month.
Do you want to live in a different future than this? I do… and we have to start now!
Plant trees. Dig swales. Save seed. Raise animals. Learn from your land. Cooperate and barter with your neighbors. Build perennial systems that outlast the next election, the next market crash, the next Silicon Valley hallucination, and hopefully the next mass extinction.
That’s how we fight the Zombie Drone Apocalypse. Not with AR-15s, bunker prepping, or a 25-year supply of sterilized food and water. We survive and thrive with fruit and nut trees, pasture and crop rotation, species diversity and ecological interdependence.
Do you want peace? Grow it. Do you want resilience? Plant it. Do you want freedom? Earn it — one tree at a time.
Because in the end, nature bats last. And if you’re smart, you’ll be on her team.
