In terms of staying the same, farmers remain very much at the mercy of Mother Nature. The best laid cropping plans can go for naught by early spring or fall frost, too much, or too little rain, or one storm spotted with hail, or too much heat at a critical time in the growing season.
Farmers have always operated with one eye on the sky, and that is not likely to change.
Ditto, one eye on the farm press trying to determine what the political whims of the major traders in farm commodities are. While supply and demand remains a driver of commodity prices, those trends can be diverted by tariffs and subsidies put in place typically to make a political point in a dispute that has little, if anything to do with farming and food.
Again, there is little prospect that will change.
Countries might talk about free trade as a goal, but in reality disputes are always arising, even between major trading partners such as the United States and Canada. Politics being what it is, that will not change.
But, change is also at the core of farming.
In the past 30-plus years how farming happens on the surface looks very much as it always has, with planting followed by a season of hope and then harvest.
However, today’s high clearance sprayers with computers monitoring everything as frankly alien-like when compared to the sprayer of 1990, and even more so when I look back to the primitive tank and boom contraption my father used.
And that reality holds true across all farm equipment, air seeders, tractors, combines and the rest. Each is a tech-marvel these days with computers fine tuning operations and gathering more information than all but the most optimistic would have dreamed 30 years ago.
Of course, the farm maybe different too.
They have been growing in acreage since the end of the first great war, but can that continue? Time will tell.
Will climate change be real as many fear, and how might that change for a farmer’s farm?
Will farmers face greater regulation in terms of chemical use? Almost assuredly that will be the case.
Whether the above changes occur is unknown of course, but change will happen, and it will change farming, whether for the better though is also unknown.
The trend to greater computer technology being integral to farming will only continue and considering the growth of computer tech, one cannot even guess what may be a reality on farms by 2050 – 30 years into the future.
