Agricultural Review

The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be

Professor William C Bailey
Chair, School of Agriculture
Western Illinois University
Macomb, Illinois

The quote – “The future ain’t what it used to be” – is from famed baseball player and manager Yogi Berra.  I grew up watching Yogi but knowledge of his abilities seems to have slowly slid into the past.  However, his quotes remain and this particular quote applies directly to the recent Farm Expo (nee Ag Mech Show) at Western Illinois University (WIU).

Featured at this year’s Farm Expo was a 19th century McCormick reaper.  The reaper was donated to WIU by John Sargent, a WIU alum and Vice President of Marketing and Logistics for McCormick USA.  While it is difficult to believe, looking at the reaper, it, quite literally, revolutionized grain harvesting. It permitted harvesting of 5 – 7 acres of grain when less than one acre was harvested previously.  Technology replaced muscle.  The reaper displayed at WIU was, in its time, cutting edge technology and a promise of the future.

That future, today, has changed more than the inventor Cyrus McCormick could have imagined.  The future that he saw, truly, isn’t what it used to be.  I will use the most recent edition of the magazine “The Corn and Soybean Digest” to explore today’s reality which those who invented, and eventually used, WIU’s McCormick reaper could not have imagined.  Let’s discuss precision farming.

Precision farming is a concept well known to farmers, but to those outside of farming, the phrase seems almost like an oxymoron – an incongruous phrase, one containing contradictory terms.  Farming, after all, mostly involves some guy on a tractor or other large machine driving around a field creating dust.  What could possibly be precise about that?  The reality is that most grain and soybean farmers are either using very sophisticated precision farming tools or seriously considering their use.  Precision farming uses global positioning systems to track and operate farming equipment at optimum levels of efficiency; Global Information Systems are used to understand cropping variability; and sensors are employed to help apply fertilizer where it is most needed, not where it is not needed.

Other contemporary precision farming tools include auto-guidance or auto-steering equipment that permit farmers to cover fields more efficiently and sensor technology that help keep track of crop growing progress so that poorly developing crop areas may be addressed.  On some farms, equipment is actually operated, untouched by human hands, by computers while being monitored many miles away.

Those tools, like the McCormick reaper in its day, are seen by many as pushing the technological envelop as far as possible.  But just as Cyrus McCormick could not see a future where information from satellites is used to drive tractors, what new technologies will arise in the future that are completely unseen today?  For agriculture, the future will never be what is used to be.