The Future of Farming
*This post was extracted from Jess the Farmer’s “Stone to Table,” a weekly publication penned by Jess Stone for an online newspaper called ‘Good News Colchester.’
Most nights I am in bed at 9:00 pm and have no trouble falling asleep. The moment I hit the pillow, my mind shuts down and I stay asleep until it wakes me with fervor at 4:00 am. During the early morning hours, my dreams come alive and I wake with new ideas or find myself in awe over something I believe may be the future. As a farmer, I am always thinking of the future which can be filled with exciting or worrisome change. The key is knowing how to adapt when change comes, and those plans often come to me in dreams, too. One of my more recent dreams these last couple of years has been about farming technologies. I’ll share the highlights here below:
The future of farming is riddled with technological ‘advances’ and dependencies that may allow farmers to sleep at night without real work or worry, and then wake to crashed systems followed by heaping piles of loss and despair.
The future is driving farming into a new world of large scale, high tech operations with fast paced automations, data driven corn and soybean farms with sterile greenhouses and hydroponic systems that require ample resources to build and maintain. Add the reliance on chemical fertility to give ‘life’ to sterile soil, which simply becomes an inert object that data analysis presupposes, and year-round connection to an all-consuming power grid of which there is complete dependency.
These are the dreams of business media infatuated with investment opportunities – the dependence of all these approaches on complex systems with no traditional controls. The goal is to just about eliminate human labor while operating these high tech farms producing cheap food on a massive scale to feed millions. The odds cannot be in favor of these technology driven, government-subsidized systems designed for overproduction that have previously bankrupted companies which all made farmers dependent on inputs that grow more expensive by the day. And all for marginal gains on what already produces marginal gains….
I beg you all to think about this more seriously. Regardless of the predictable outcomes, this is still the ‘future of farming’ as we are currently voting around the world for low cost, cheap food on a massive scale. And in the process of this push to ‘go big or go home,’ we lose so many important contributions traditional farmers bring to the table.
Farmers work the land in traditional ways to stay close to the land, which brings meaning to their lives while offering a fresh source of dignity and substance during their time here on Earth. This connection carries through our communities not just because humans need calories to fill their stomachs, but because the backbone and heart of our communities also lies with our ability to feed our souls. Traditional farming does that. Technology-based farming does not.
I want to point out the obvious: traditional farming or land farming is also subject to weather conditions and other risks. To be clear, no type of farming stands without risk, however the old-fashioned way of farming brings us natural variability, tried and true adaptations, diversity in crop options, and unique techniques to keep moving forward in the face of adversity.
You won’t find any of that in these supposedly ‘fail-safe’ technologies where expenses are exorbitantly high and the fixers of failed technology cost far more than farmers with their hands in the soil. Those with their hands in the soil are the ones with a strong desire to increase soil fertility and biodiversity, reduce or eliminate tillage, sequester carbon, and encourage the proliferation of species that make up a healthy ecosystem. It is these folks who are laying the groundwork for human scale farms which are small and focused on the future.
If we are seeking a truly sustainable future in farming, we must keep our farmers close to the land and vote with our dollars to keep their hands dirty.