Gene Logsdon: Don't Get Too Excited About Robot Farmers

As he rolls into his ninth decade, author and farmer Gene Logsdon takes on these topics as targets for wry criticism, throwing water on the buzz of agricultural technology in blog posts and articles for Farming Magazine.

Farm drones? They will be more of an annoyance than an assistance to farmers. Precision agriculture? “Predictive agriculture” and “prescription agriculture” have already elbowed out the term in the speeches of farm-tech boosters. It won’t be long before those terms go out of style also.

In his latest book, Gene Everlasting: A Contrary Farmer’s Thoughts on Living Forever, Logsdon takes on the real next big thing — ya know, death. He finds a life of farming is a pretty good place to start when contemplating mortality. His intimacy with cycles of life and death have helped inform meditations on his own end. “Only through change is permanence achieved… ,” he writes. “To understand immortality, embrace mortality.”

We caught up with the contrary farmer to talk about the future.

Modern Farmer: In a number of blogs and articles, you’ve touched on agriculture’s sudden enthusiasm for all things technological — drones, robotic tractors, and fancy data-driven approaches. What draws you to commenting on those topics?

Gene Logsdon: Man, robots are the future, for better or for worse. For me, this topic provides an unending inspiration for philosophical and humorous commentaries on the idiocy of the human race. As I write somewhere, I think it is the current issue of Farming Magazine, it will soon be possible to buy or rent a robot to do all your work, and then you buy or rent one to go fishing for you.

Robots can not only do the work, but they can now be programmed to correct their own mistake and repair themselves. It is only a matter of time before they realize that they don’t need humans anymore and get rid of us. They will then have accomplished the most efficient farming of all. Since robots don’t eat food, they won’t need to produce any. Can’t get any more efficient than that.

Before it gets that far along, we can make ourselves immortal, as I joke in my last book, Gene Everlasting, by inserting our DNA into a robot that looks and acts exactly like we act. Even after death, our robotic selves go on hoeing our gardens for us. We will be immortal. And then I think of how the Monsanto farmers will program their farm machine robots to kill all the organic farmers’ crops and vice versa.

The robot war of the millennium. This is just a very fertile field for humor writing.

MF: So do you remember a time when the hype around a new agricultural technology didn’t live up to its promise?

GL: I am old enough to remember when the tech dreamers talked seriously about an airplane in every garage. All this adoration of data, like the adoration of so called precision farming of the last generation is just bullshit talk to sell products. It’s nice to have calculators built into cell phones so you can figure out how many ears of corn are growing in your corn field, but that’s not going to make the price of corn go up. Just the price of cell phones.

Every piece of farm machinery that comes along doesn’t live up to its promise because its promise is to make life easier and richer for the farmer and just about the time it accomplishes that, it is outmoded in favor of something bigger or faster. The really sensational examples of not living up to its promise are just now enfolding. Antibiotics have been considered the greatest blessing in livestock production because it made possible raising animals in very high numbers in very close quarters. But now the future effectiveness of antibiotics is much in doubt. The moldboard plow, the very icon of agriculture, is being replaced by so-called “no-till” machines and methods.

Keep in mind that through all the history of improvements in farming, still one of the most profitable kinds of farming is with horses and smart Amish men.

MF: And you also write that automated tractors aren’t as new to farming as most might think.

GL: My uncle’s tractor, a Ford 8 N back in 1947 I think, had wide front end tires, not like many tractors then where the front wheels are right next to each other in the center. With the tires wide apart like that, the one front tire and one of the back tires run in the plow furrow of the preceding round across the field without hardly any guiding. Uncle figured out that if one was plowing in a circle, the plow would hold the tractor tires right there in the furrow up against the vertical wall of the furrow. So he laid out a round furrow out in the middle of the field, and by golly the tractor followed it round and round without any guidance at all. Of course this meant that the very center of the field remained unplowed and the outside corners of the field unplowed too, so the robot tractor wasn’t all that practical. But it was a sight to see in progress.

MF: Do you take a lesson from that memory?

GL: The lessons to be learned, I think, is how resourceful farmers are, how creative, how HUMAN, which is the opposite of robotic. The basic lesson is that no matter how cleverly the government or big business thinks it can maneuver farmers to do its will, they will fail.

Too many of us are contrary bastards.

This interview has been edited for content and length

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