Mid-winter is the time when we all trudge out to the Best Western on the edge of town for the annual ‘Spring Outlook’ conference sponsored by the banks and the feed companies. I have been travelling that circuit for nearly 30 years now, offering comic relief between the solemn pronouncements of various experts in the field of agriculture. The speaking order is pretty much always the same wherever I go. First, someone tells me what interest rates are going to do and then someone tells me where soybean prices will go. Then the technology guy gets up to talk about the next new thing and warns me that the rate of change in agriculture is speeding up and if I don’t jump on some sort of train right now, it will leave the station without me.
I was trained as an economist back in the 1970s and I actually tried to practise the profession until I realized that economists are terrible at predicting what will happen. That’s because you can’t construct an economic model that behaves anything like the real world. It’s just too complicated. Then I began to realize that no one else was very good at predicting what will happen either. Investment counsellors, central bankers, technology gurus, climatologists. . . all of them were wrong all of the time. They all missed the bursting of the tech bubble in 2000, the financial meltdown of 2008, the crop price spikes of 2007 and 2011. And the oil price collapse of the last year came as yet another complete surprise.
Nassim Taleb, the professor of ‘uncertainty’ who wrote “The Black Swan” says that humans have always been terrible at predicting what will happen, but we are brilliant at adapting to unforeseen events. We are better at adapting and coping with change than any other species on the planet. That’s why there are now more than seven billion of us on earth.
But the farm conference plods on in the same old format. Last week I went to one where the economist and the grain trader told us that not much would change with interest rates or commodity prices over the next year. Then the technology guru got up and told us that everything about farming will change exponentially and those of us who think we can do everything the same way we did last year will be out of business within the decade.
He showed us a picture of a farmer sitting in a boat with a fishing rod while he scouted his crops a hundred miles away with his solar-powered iPad and a drone. He showed us driverless tractors, farmers with 3-D virtual reality goggles walking through a dairy barn. Then we saw 3-D printers that make tractor parts, houses and even a hamburger. All of this will be in our hands shortly. The new face of farming.
The one constant in all of this is the roomful of farmers sitting with arms folded and wearing that impassive stare they reserve for anyone who starts pointing the way forward. They will never come out and tell you what is going through their mind, unless you catch them on their own an hour later out in the parking lot.
“So . . . “ I said to a beefy guy in his 40s as he pulled his coat out of the truck and checked his phone. “What do you think of the new face of farming?”
“They’ve all got something to sell, haven’t they? Just a question if you want to buy it.”
That observation took me back fifty years to an old guy on the seventh line of Mono Township who once told me that the whole trick of this business of farming was to try not to buy anything . . . ever. He pointed out to me that the Amish drew a line in the sand in 1885, when all of the important mechanical processes of farming had been invented: the chilled steel plow, the seed drill, the mower and the threshing machine.
In the space of fifty years farming moved from Biblical times to the present day. But the Amish said things had gone far enough and they refused to put steam power in front of those machines. They couldn’t build or repair a steam tractor and they didn’t see why it would be a good idea to give up a source of power they could harness themselves.
Now that I think of it, even back then they had a 3-D printer that would produce a new horse. It was called a horse and it was solar powered. Some of the really good ones were driverless, too.
- Dan Needles