I grew up in farming country and worked on them.
Okay, we have reached common ground... you know if we tried just a little, we may even be friends or at least friendly to each other... or at most not angry with each other.
As far as cotton? Nope... I live on a Wheat Ranch, and the only corn we grow is seed corn. Green peas are a rotational crop, and pulling plugged peas out of a pea combine is a real pain, night or day.
I have worked year round on a Wheat ranch, and done just about every job there is while working here.
But, I spent thirty years working as an auto mechanic, plenty of hard dirty work in the shop...
I graduated a couple years ago with a Bachelors degree... that was the easiest job I ever had...
So, are you going to reach out and take my hand for a hand shake, or should I just move on?
you seem defensive...no idea why.
I got some edumacation too.
a masters degree forty years ago, the prerequisite bachelors , an associate and a drawer full of technical certificates.
but we was talking automation...lemme tell you a story.
I was also a school bus driver...for about five years.
when I first started driving for the school district it had about ten 72 passenger buses.
Kress Texas...you've probably NOT heard of it...little town on the high plains. Almost everyone was a farmer. Lots of farm kids then
Five years later...not so much. For one reason or another the farms needed fewer and fewer people to work them....the number of kids going to school dropped so much that we only needed three buses and one of them was a mini van.
So...why are less people needed to farm? Will the trend continue? Are we going to pay nonexistent people? Doesn't seem like a problem to me.
Defensive, maybe, maybe not... I'm new here... and I do want to start off on the right foot here... although I can be a bit of smart aleck at times, I mean no harm...
I guess my first question about where the farm kids went would be, did the farms become industrialized and get larger?
I'm not going to say automation isn't a boon to agriculture, I've seen first hand the successive generations of equipment on the ranch I worked on. I've found old horse shoes the equipment picked up out of the fields we work.
The ranch I worked on has been family owned for four generations, and I swear they never threw anything away... we have old tracked Caterpillars from the thirties on the property, and models all the way up to today's AGCO Challengers. We have farm implements that are built with wooden frames. And, we have Air Drills that seed the field and apply fertilizer at different rates in different zones in the field... tech's great... and I'll drive with GPS every chance I get...
I just had some pea combines drive by that replaced the old combines we have... one of the newer combines will do the work of four of our old ones.
And, I've watched videos of the newest prototype tractors that have no cabs working the fields... but I have a hard time believing they'll completely replace human drivers on the ground we farm. Driving off a cliff is a real hazard we face. We drive very steep hill sides that when the people from the Mid-West come to see us, their first question is, "You guys farm that!"
Technology will catch up, but sometimes I wonder if it's cost effective to spend hundreds, and hundreds of millions, maybe billions of dollars designing new farm equipment that is meant to replace farm hands that earn a little over minimum wage? Is the trade off worth it, or are engineers just doing it because they can? Is it really a problem that needs fixing?
but I have a hard time believing they'll completely replace human drivers on the ground we farm
Probably not. The drivers won't be replaced. Why replace something that's obsolete?
They won't 'drive on the ground' any longer.
I've written about this before. Farming as we know it won't last much longer. It will be replaced by automated food production. At the present moment, using advanced growing techniques. Open air farms are outproduced 100 to one.
Greenhouses are just the start.
Vertical urban farms are a tiny bit more advanced.
Hydroponics, Aquaponics, are being developed now.
(don't forget sea farming)
eventually it will be possible to take the Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen (found in the air) add a few 'micro-nutrients' for taste, synthesize and 3D print our food.
OH..you say...Maybe Someday...but not very soon.
You can't imagine it..
A billion times more advanced in only Thirty years...
BUT WAIT
what about fifty years?
Maybe the real question is how many years will it take an optimist to convince a cynic of the bright days to come? 😉
We've had an interesting discussion and that's all I'm really looking for...
Hope to see you around for another one, but I have to get an article ready for publication and some dinner for me and my favorite dog...
g-night
I'll be here.