GROWMARK Missouri 2020 Essay Contest Winner

Farmer of the Future
by Claudia Hadlock, Miller FFA Chapter, Miller, Missouri

For a farmer, the future can be very intimidating. Tomorrow is extremely unpredictable, and a farmer has no choice but to depend on things that he/she cannot control. The future farmer will need to learn to rely on new technologies to help them produce enough for the constantly growing population.

It is 7:00 am on a Monday in 2045, my dad is sitting at the table drinking his Folgers coffee. I walk in to see my father checking the cows on his iPhone XXXV. His remote-controlled drone is patrolling the fields and monitoring the cattle. Then he switches over to analyze the satellite crop reports. He checks the temperature, expected growth, and soil acidity levels to ensure his crops are thriving.

My mom strolls in with her MacBook Pro 20 and starts the robot planting swarm. The robots are programmed to plant the field by themselves and are easier to fix and manage than planters of the past. The swarm allows my parents to work on other things while the robots are planting crops. That's when my job comes into play. My duty is to release the bees, using Bee Vectoring Technology. I strategically placed the hives in perfect position for the robots to complete their job by opening up the hives so the bees can naturally pollinate our whole field while spreading the Vectorite that combats diseases and pests and naturally improves the quality of our crops. Vectorite is placed in their hives and as they leave it attaches to them like pollen would, which allows them to send a season long implementation of fungicide to the crops without harm to bees’ health or livelihood, all while protecting the environment.

While the robots are cultivating the 3,000-acre field, my parents send the satellite data to customers, so they can examine the quality of the crops they are purchasing. Around noon, my mother heads to the farm headquarters to get her feeding tractor. She drives to the field and sets the GPS so that the tractor will drive itself to where it needs to go. As the tractor makes its rounds, the feeder puts out silage for the cows.

Flash forward to September and it is harvesting season. Our business partners from Florida bring in their fleet of robot choppers. These robots are more efficient for large operations and they eliminate user error. They send out the robots into our corn fields and chop corn to turn it into silage. Once the corn is chopped and ready, they send the trucks to the consumers. The buyers of the silage then feed their numerous livestock to be butchered and sold for food.

While things like “robot choppers”, “robot planters”, and “bee vectoring technology” may seem like something out of a sci-fi movie, the technology advancements that we are making every day could result in these products being in the marketplace, very soon.