C.S. Lewis, an Englishman born in Ireland, enjoyed poking fun at the Irish with the story of the man who bought two stoves. “It is like the famous Irishman who found that a certain kind of stove reduced his fuel bill by half and thence concluded that two stoves of the same kind would enable him to warm his house with no fuel at all.”
There are many good reasons to be cautious about the misuse of technology — to not, like the Irishman, think that more tech is always better. Agricultural technology is no exception. In this issue of Acres U.S.A., we feature two articles that paint quite skeptical pictures of how technology is being applied on American farmland.
Anneliese Abbott first argues that most of what we call precision agriculture is really just greenwashing — when all the costs are truly accounted for, she contends that “smart” technology doesn’t actually help the environment, and it simultaneously rips off farmers. Mark Shepard then piles on with his typical sharp-elbowed common sense: farmers are increasingly owned by their technology — many have become no more than technocratic sharecroppers. Also in Shepard’s style, though, he concludes with a hopeful message: ecological agriculture, with its emphasis on appropriate technology and cooperation with nature, can free farmers from reliance on our tech overlords!
In light of this double gut punch to technology, I feel compelled to remind the reader that the aforementioned Irishman did in fact benefit from technology: he went from no stove to a stove — from a pretty miserable existence, continually breathing in smoke, to a cozy cottage. It’s easy to forget that many of the technologies invented over the past 300 years have helped raise billions out of poverty. We’ve only started to rue it in the past few decades, when we got so rich that we’ve had the luxury of doing just fine without more new inventions.
There’s also the argument that if some technologies had been developed earlier, we may not have ended up with the post-WW2 industrial farming movement and its destructive ecological effects. As Joel Salatin has pointed out, if farmers in the 1950s had had ready access to inexpensive portable electric fencing, to PVC tubing for water transport, and to hydraulics for dump buckets and wood chippers to make compost — not to mention plant sap testing and a better understanding of soil biology — what we know as conventional, synthetic-chemistry-focused agriculture may never have gained a foothold.
To take the mild techno-optimism one step further, consider last month’s review. It wasn’t the usual book review but rather a look at FieldLark.ai, an AI tool (tool — not overlord!) that answers technical agronomic questions in order to help farmers better understand how plants and the soil work. That information in hand, growers can then ask better questions of their agronomists and of one another. Books, magazines and conferences are still vital in exposing farmers to new ideas, in going in-depth on specific topics, and for maintaining the human-centric nature of farming — but AI does do some things well.
The Irishman was right to get one stove, and two would have been fine, too — just not for the reason he expressed. Let’s learn how to use tools appropriately — with proper expectations.
And that’s the view from the country.
