Early in the morning I was paging through one of the farm magazines that pile up this time of year.\u00a0 I came to a photo of a driverless tractor.\u00a0 Case IH is calling it a concept vehicle.\u00a0 All the equipment companies are experimenting in this brave new world.\u00a0 I sent the photo out to some friends with the comment, \u201cI guess I\u2019ll be looking for work pretty soon.\u201d<\/p>\n
I have spent a large share of my career driving a tractor.\u00a0 It\u2019s mildly disconcerting to see something you know so well, only you\u2019ve been cut out of the picture.\u00a0 The tractor is an odd-looking beast.\u00a0 When you remove the cab from a tractor, it begins to look like an animal without a head.<\/p>\n
This is not a surprise to us farmers.\u00a0 There have been tremendous leaps in agricultural technology over the last decades, and this one is predictable.\u00a0 With the combination of GPS, auto-steer, and guidance systems, the driverless tractor is a logical next step.\u00a0 Almost assuredly, you will see a driverless tractor in a field near you soon.<\/p>\n
There are \u201cearly adapters\u201d as technology moves out of the lab and on to the farm.\u00a0 I am not one of them.\u00a0 I still actually steer my tractor.\u00a0 That puts me in the minority of farmers right there.\u00a0 My rows still have embarrassing wobbles in them.\u00a0 The wobbles might indicate taking a sip of water or checking my phone.\u00a0 Regardless, I can see my dad Sylvester shaking his head from the beyond.<\/p>\n
It humbles me to have to admit that the neighbor\u2019s rows are straighter than mine.\u00a0 Those straight rows may be mostly cosmetic, but auto-steer does point to the future.\u00a0 In that future, there is no doubt a next-generation farm operator can be more efficient than me.\u00a0 I could make a go of it partly because I\u2019ve put off purchases and used my labor instead, farming on the cheap.\u00a0 But as modern machinery investments get spread out over thousands of acres, my advantage slips away.<\/p>\n
Even if I\u2019m a \u201cnon-adapter,\u201d I can\u2019t help but be impressed by the possibilities.\u00a0 Drones will go out and relay information about crop condition, weeds, insects, and diseases.\u00a0 Then precise amounts of fertilizer and pesticides can be applied exactly where it is needed and no more.\u00a0 The environmental benefits are apparent.<\/p>\n
What happens to labor requirements on farms in this rapidly approaching future?\u00a0 The answer to that is obvious.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Or two.<\/p>\n
Of course, it wasn\u2019t always so.\u00a0 Go back just a few generations, and there were families working on 160 acres all across the middle of this continent.\u00a0 Big families had an advantage because there were more workers.<\/p>\n
A century ago, it took twenty hours of labor to produce a hundred bushels of corn.\u00a0 Today, that might be down to minutes.\u00a0 There aren\u2019t many of us who would choose to go back to live and work on a farm in 1917.\u00a0 It was tough, physically demanding work, dirty.\u00a0 Often it was dangerous.\u00a0 In addition, it wasn\u2019t that lucrative.\u00a0 For most of our nation\u2019s history, farm families accepted twenty per cent less income than workers in the city.<\/p>\n
For all of that, there was something unique and worth commemorating about what we had in the United States. \u00a0Our 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.\u00a0 Being able to own a piece of land was something generations wished for but few were given the opportunity.\u00a0 For most of human history, land belonged to the pharaoh or king or whoever held power.<\/p>\n
When America came to be, there was a whole continent to divvy up.\u00a0 (That is if you ignore the Native people who were here, which is no small matter.)\u00a0 For all its flaws, America offered a chance to live on a piece of land that the worker owned.\u00a0 Thousands of families spread out across our nation, both citizens and landowners.\u00a0 They had a stake in the land, which meant they had a stake in the future.<\/p>\n
Again, it was not perfect.\u00a0 There are myriad stories of abuse, alcoholism, and dysfunctional families on the frontier.\u00a0 It was not perfect, but it many ways it was as close to perfect as human society has come.\u00a0 Now, we are giving that up.<\/p>\n
There is little doubt that less and less people will be needed in this future of driverless tractors.\u00a0 It is part of the American story that the economy is always churning, ever changing.\u00a0 Jobs constantly become obsolete.<\/p>\n
I was talking with a few friends around my age who farm.\u00a0 All of us grew up on the diverse labor-intensive farms of a half century ago.\u00a0 Those were places where manure making its way from barn to field usually got there aided by a pitchfork.\u00a0 Weeds were often pulled by hand.\u00a0 Feed for livestock was shoveled or baled.\u00a0 There was work for a whole family and then some.<\/p>\n
A couple of us have a son or daughter interested in the farm, but nothing very settled.\u00a0 As we imagine the future of our farms, it\u2019s hard not to see drones and driverless tractors in them.\u00a0 But not so much a farmer.\u00a0 If a next generation is going to work these farms, it probably will require an off-farm job.\u00a0 Or perhaps it will mean joining somehow into one of the larger operations.<\/p>\n
But as we head down that path, it\u2019s good to remember where we came from.\u00a0 We will continue to produce food in these fields that surround us.\u00a0 It will be with less labor, and it will be efficient.\u00a0 But it won\u2019t be the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Early in the morning I was paging through one of the farm magazines that pile up this time of year.\u00a0 I came to a photo of a driverless tractor.\u00a0 Case IH is calling it a concept vehicle.\u00a0 All the equipment companies are experimenting in this brave new world.\u00a0 I sent the photo out to some …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[162],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weeds-by-randy-krzmarzick"],"aioseo_notices":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-22 22:06:34","action":"change-status","newStatus":"trash","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91993"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91994,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91993\/revisions\/91994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sleepyeyeonline.com\/goodnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}