The importance of farmers’ memories
The importance of farmers’ memories
... A Letter from Iowan Josiah C. Wearin
Letters From Iowans is a part of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. We encourage you, our subscribers, to share your perspective in this column. To make your voice heard, use this form to send us your essay:
Tech companies and agribusiness firms of all sizes are pushing hard into artificial intelligence and robotics, and the need is huge. The efficiencies produced by variable rate fertilization, variable rate planting, and selective application of herbicides are extremely important for all food/feed/fiber production. This is truly a fascinating time to be alive and observing such innovations.
Some work on pelletizing seeds so that they can lie dormant for six months would be welcome. This could lead to double cropping and better utilization of cover crops. Perhaps it is happening in labs right now and I am simply uninformed.
What we should not attempt to replace is the farmers and ranchers who have actually worked with a particular piece of land or group of animals over a number of years.
However, this attrition is happening. Each year, fewer land owners actually operate their farms and ranches, and fewer farmers and ranchers actually work the land and tend the animals.
The trends in farming, and to a lesser extent in ranching, are toward cash renting or “custom farming.” Cash renting reduces the owners’ actual involvement in what happens on the land. It also leads to greater turnover in tenants. Thus the stewardship of the land becomes far less important than profitability.
Custom farming involves the owner hiring the farmer or herder to perform particular jobs for flat fees. Machine work or animal caretaking is thus parceled out to the operator on a cash basis. The care of the land will vary with the owner’s desires, but may often suffer if practices by the operator cannot be performed on a timely basis, in accordance with the weather.
Extension services across the U.S. seem to be aware of these trends and generally encourage flexible leases, designed so that each party, landowner and tenant, shares some of the risk of commodity market fluctuations. I should add that all commodity prices, whether of corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, cattle, hogs, sheep, or the all-important, oil, have been wild of late. This makes determination of the market for cash rent extremely volatile. In turn, cash rent auctions for farmland have developed over the past 20 years.
An option other than “flex leases” is the old standby “crop share lease,” by which landowner and tenant negotiate a division of the actual crop so that each has crop to sell on the open market. Likewise a division of crop expenses, such as seed, fertilizer, pesticides, crop storage, crop hauling and crop drying, is negotiated. Most such leases assume that the tenant will bear the expense of machinery and labor, while the landowner will be responsible for property taxes and maintenance of infrastructure. This crop share arrangement tends to be the fairest arrangement for sharing of risk … and allows the landowner involvement in management to the extent desired.
Due to the increasing age of landowners, use of the crop share lease is waning, and the flex lease does not seem to be increasing rapidly. On the contrary, cash rent remains predominant in most Midwestern states.
In addition, the elderly landowner is apt to want more cash per acre and to opt for a new tenant every few years. They either use “word of mouth” for finding better levels of rent, or opt for cash rent auctions or professional farm management. This tendency leads to a shuffle of actual farmers on each plot of land.
So while I strongly advocate for more farmers on the land and more livestock raised outdoors (uphill battles, to be sure), my real frustration stems from the fact that we are locked in a system whereby fewer farmers/operators stick with a particular farm or field for any extended period of time.
Conservation and stewardship rarely occur without long-term land tenure. Wise land use requires that active engagement by both the landowner and the tenant. Without farmers’ memories, the land will always suffer.
Why is familiarity with a farm or even a particular field, so important? Couldn’t it all just be replaced by giant amounts of data and AI? Suffice it to say that I am extremely skeptical of that notion, if not a total contrarian.
Let’s review some of the little conversations farmers could have, if they had the long-term experience:
“Why not use more end-rows here?” … “Well, check how steep it is. I have seen the May rains create rill erosion in the end-rows even though we are using no-till methods. Let’s think about this.”
“Why not plant that wet corner? It will surely grow if we’re lucky.” … “Sure, in two out of eight years, it will grow a nice crop. In the other six, nothing but weeds. It would be better off in grass. The cows will enjoy it in the fall and spring between crops.”
“There is a seepy spot in the north 40, just at the end of the terrace midway up the hill along the west waterway. Tom and I loaded a wagon with corn there one October night and quit for the night. By morning it had sunk into the soil so far that we had to use a loader tractor to pull it from the mud.”
“The combines left an unusual amount of corn on the ground near the north grove yesterday. Don’t turn the cows out there to glean unless you either pick up one heck of lot of corn or acclimate the cows to full feed of corn first. Otherwise they may develop acidosis, and die.”
“Let’s put a tube in at this crossing, then the hay trailers won’t have so much trouble navigating the little stream.” … “No, let’s think about how deep the water was five winters ago, when the built up ice and water would have covered the tractor. If you construct the tube and crossing improperly, you will create a dam which will just overflow, washing out the tube, roadway and fences.”
“Why haven’t you put drain tile in that flat pasture so that you can plant row crops?” … “Because it will flood every five to seven years, that’s why. And it makes great pasture the rest of the time. Besides, how can we ensure the herbicides and fertilizers won’t go straight into the river in the wet times? There is no way to install proper buffer strips or even construct those filters with wood chips, since the fall to the river is almost nonexistent.”
“Let’s tear out those trees along the creek. They’re just nuisances.” … “Whoa, those things have been there for 50 or 60 years. Have you ever seen how the creek eats huge chunks of dirt when you farm right up to it? I mean chunks of soil which would swallow up three shop buildings?”
“Why do you need those terraces anyway? No-till will do it and you can drive straight through without all those point rows.” … “Sure if you want to create 10 times the erosion, go right ahead. And quit contour planting while you’re at it!”
Do we really think artificial intelligence or robotics will properly deal with such details?
Wendell Berry summed it up in his essay, “Imagination in Place”: “The most insistent and formidable concern of agriculture, wherever it is taken seriously, is the distinct individuality of every farm, every field on every farm, every farm family, and every creature on every farm.”
Josiah C. Wearin
Hastings, Iowa
Letters From Iowans is a part of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. We encourage you, our subscribers, to share your perspective in this column. To make your voice heard, use this form to send us your essay:
Iowa Writers’ Collaborative columnists:
P.S. Since this essay was posted, I asked our tech savvy son to comment on it. "What is your call to action?", he said, and "Why are you not understanding that AI is more powerful than we can imagine?" He is co-founder of a user experience design firm, FuegoUX.com. John Deere, if you are listening and need great assistance, find him.
I assured him that I am not a true Luddite, but just ignorant and skeptical.
Nate also ran the essay by three different AI sites, for suggestions on revisions. Those were Claude, Bard, and ChatGPT. This was of course a humbling experience, but actually quite educational.
We then discussed the power of the tech firms....and the complete lack of understanding about AI in the governmental realm. AI is disrupting every single sector of the economy, and our legislators seem to have no clue.
Those of us who care about conservation of soil, water, wildlife and other resources, diversity of species, pollution, food deserts, the dearth of farmers, etc. need to insist that the ethics boards of the giant tech firms become educated about values that we cherish. We cannot afford to just sit by and lament. Otherwise the LLM's will continue to be as amoral as the data they are fed. (My crude interpretation, of course.)
A complex and daunting task....... and one which I invite all the writers in this Collaborative to ponder.
Thanks so much!