Each year we are faced with new technological breakthroughs that eventually we have to accept, reject or adopt.
Automobiles were a rich man’s hobby until Henry Ford developed the assembly line to produce Model T’s that a working man could afford. Electricity put the coal oil lamp manufacturers out of business. The electric refrigerator sent the ice man looking for another profession, but soon we had to eat leftovers.
The arrival of a new electric milking machine allowed my grandma to retire from hand-milking half the cow herd night and morning. The introduction of the tractor and combine during wartime allowed more work to be done by less farmers and left more men to go to fight.
Artificial insemination of animals allowed wider spread use of the best genetics and faster advancements in milk, meat, and egg production. We still see bulls widely used on beef farms where they take great interest in their job and do it automatically with little or no supervision.
Hybrid seeds soon became widely accepted in North America because farmers soon realized that higher yields, less stalk breakage, faster dry down in the fall and better quality crops could be expected. GMO seeds, plants, and even fish have been widely accepted by many because of ease of weed and pest control in crops and faster growth in salmon but are still being scrutinized, though health problems have not yet been proven not to be connected.
In the 1940s we read comic books about robots but now they weld our car frames together and fabricate most of our appliances. Many herds of dairy cows line up to be milked by robotic milking machines that work 24 hours every day. These same milkers record time milked, amount of milk, temperature, grain eaten, when the cow was being milked, and prints off dozens of other reports if told to.
Unmanned robot farm tractors are now being tested on real farms. GPS technology allows farmers to till fields, plant perfectly straight rows, spray crops without missing or overlapping and harvest crops both day and night.
Migratory birds with a brain the size of a pea can fly thousands of miles back to the same nest in the same tree. Honey bees with a brain the size of a pin head can fly 10 miles in search of nectar and get back to their hive. Neither birds nor bees fly at night! They must use more than GPS. They did this before satellites were invented. Do some of our commonly used chemicals disrupt their ability to retrace their flight? How do butterflies get from Mexico to Pontiac when just one trip can take the insect four generations to get here?
Drones with GPS were developed to spy on the enemy. Today drones can be a toy or used for crop inspections, crop spraying, collecting live videos of disasters, etc.. Some of these new technologies can be combined to give us driverless electric cars, trucks, tractors and even corn planters.
Corn under plastic was developed in Ireland a couple decades ago to allow fertilizer and corn seeds to be planted with the same machine unrolling a sheet of biodegradable plastic over the row and covering both sides of the plastic sheet with earth. This created a miniature greenhouse over the corn rows which allowed the corn to be planted several weeks earlier than normal. Until this process was invented the season was too short for corn to grow and mature in Ireland. The Irish company tried to introduce it to Canada 15 years ago but only the Newfoundland farmers adopted the technology because they also had a very short growing season.
On May 1, I watched a Mennonite farmer sowing the first corn that I observed in 2018. He was planting corn under plastic with two horses pulling a very modern corn planter. This is obviously sweet corn to be ready for sale in early August or even July. Some technologies will be adopted by everyone while others may be rejected.
Guns replaced the bow and arrow. Bombs replaced the tank, but we still wonder if some inventions were a good idea.
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations. gladcrest@gmail.com
