Why Do Visions of Farming’s Future Never Involve Farmers?

 B.R. Cohen


Now the robots are coming for our farms. The Washington Post tells us “farmworkers could be replaced by robots sooner than we think.” The Guardian paints a picture of “space bots with lasers, killing plants.” The New Yorker calls ours the “age of robot farmers,” forecasting that “the future of fruit-and-vegetable farming is automation.” To illustrate that, the New Yorker writes about Berry 5.1, which has so far cost $10 million to design and would pluck strawberries more precisely than clock-punching farmhands. It also highlights an indoor vertical farm in New Jersey that runs on an operating system, grows salad greens with LED lights that are “the cheapest and most efficient way of replacing the sun,” and operates like the automated Amazon fulfillment center its owner used to manage. Many of these kinds of articles end with the rather generic claim that the efficiency of “precision agriculture” will save labor and save the planet.

That lineage began about a century ago. In the shadows of broader manufacturing development, tractors, harvesters, reapers, threshers, and combines (which smartly combined several of them) would give us the farm of tomorrow. The goal was to improve productivity so we could grow more food with fewer farmers. And it basically worked. By 1910, agricultural labor was 31 percent of the U.S. population, down from 56 percent a half-century earlier. (It was 12 percent in 1950, 2 percent in 2000.) Displaced farmers found jobs in other industrial sectors, at the cost of further separating growers from eaters.

Chemical notions about future farming followed quickly. DuPont’s “Better Living Through Chemistry” slogan made its debut in 1935. That same decade, an upstart movement called farm chemurgy emerged. Chemurgy was a strange neologism meant to evoke the chemical energy of the farm. It would help us secure industrial needs from the raw materials of agriculture. Henry Ford was a promoter, as Fordist principles of mass production could be applied to the farm too. He even made a demonstration car entirely out of farm products—soybeans—to validate the idea. 

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