One of the biggest agricultural shows in the World is happening next week in Germany. A high tech cornucopia for high tech harvests. One narrative shades another: In one version of reality, all this advanced technology is going to make life so much easier; a mobile phone, a pair of rubber boots and a pina colada. In the Dorian Gray reality, a hollowed out echo of a missing generation of young farmers being replaced by brightly colored robots or drab, cheap, migrant labor.
There is no tragedy in the loss of heavy manual labor, it’s the loss of a cultural operating system that made farming and farmers resilient. When technology (and scale) enters that world, it tends to displace old bonds, rather than translate them. The neighbor who used to help fix an engine now becomes a “remote support technician” from another country. Local knowledge, once social, becomes proprietary. The rituals, gossip, favors, bartering, …those were earlier forms of distributed intelligence, IoT doesn’t replicate that, but could it? It is not exclusively one or the other. Tools are tools.
There is an entire generation of technically savvy young people who’ve spent time cooped up in cubicles of a different type. Those people are fluent in the operating systems of big tech, being born into it. They have the capacity to develop a different kind of farming model. Consider the potential of young tech savvy people who are not traditionally based on the land, or born into farming by hereditary means. They may be the perfect fertile seedbed for the kind of tools that Agritechnica is selling.
The “right” use of IoT in agriculture may not be in the creation of “smart” farms, it might be to reconnect scattered “farmers.” To rebuild the community mesh network, not just metrics. This concept is a little broader than the regenerative agriculture ploy pitched by bigAG, Banks and tech companies. It doesn’t sit well with the single serving, one man and his dog, lifestyle either. But if you’re looking for genuine solutions to rural development, it begins with community, however that word is defined.
The “innovation” narrative nicely frames the business of agriculture; sooner, quicker, faster, higher yields – it comes from systems optimisation perspective.. But, behind a polished veneer there are still real people doing real work in real fields. Agriculture is not a system in that tech sense; it’s a culture first. It is as much about community markets, as it is about commodity markets. The land is the medium through which relationships are maintained.
