Big Farms Are About to Get Bigger
11th March 2014
Nothing is more important in agriculture than place. What is successful on one kind of soil in one kind of climate won’t necessarily work in another place with a different soil or different weather patterns. Farmers have always gained the knowledge necessary to understand a place through hard-won and rarely transferable experience. What farmer Brown knows about his land might travel down the road a few miles, but it is less applicable on a similar farm in a different part of the country. This idea of place is what drives the local food movement. Wineries brag about the perfection of the marriage between their varietals and soil. On our farm, every acre that I’ve farmed for 35 years and that my father has farmed for 65 years has a story. We know which weeds grow where, when the wet spots will appear, and we all remember that time the combine caught on fire down by the hackberry tree. Farmers’ personal relationship to place, one of the salient facts that distinguish agriculture, is about to change.
Most combines traveling across fields in the Midwest this fall had a GPS receiver located in the front of the cab. Although agriculture has been experimenting with this technology for a decade or so, only now is the industry starting to consider all the uses of this transformative technology. For several years, farmers have had the ability to map yields with global positioning data. Using that information, firms can design “prescriptions” for the farmer, who uses the “scrips” to apply seed and fertilizer in varying amounts across the field. Where the yield maps show soil with a lower yield potential, the prescription calls for fewer seeds and less fertilizer. This use of an individual farmer’s data to design a different program for each square meter in a field spanning hundreds of acres could replace a farmer’s decades of experience with satellites and algorithms. What we have gained in efficiency and by avoiding the overuse of scarce and potentially environmentally damaging inputs, we may be losing in the connections of the farm family to the ancestral place. Precision technology will allow managers to cover more acres more accurately and will likely lead to increasing size and consolidation of farms. While Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, and Alice Waters continue to argue that we need to turn back the clock on technology in agriculture, much of the world is moving in a quite different direction.
More and more, ‘farms’ are turning into food factories that just happen to be outdoors. As capital requirements increase, the size of the operation also needs to increase in order to reach necessary economies of scale.