The Future of Agriculture

The Future of Agriculture

Global positioning satellites. Bioengineered tomatoes. Poultry sensitive yield monitors and food processing plant on wheels. Prom the plough to precision farming. It's no longer old Mcdonald's farm. Next step - farming technology on Modern Marvels.

The Johansson farm in Central Kansas. Greg Johansson starts the day by feeding his family. But his job is to feed the world. American agriculture from seed to shelf is so efficient, most people don't think much about. But growing food is a sophisticated business employing science, computer-guided ground shaking machinery, and sometimes controversial techniques. American farmers generate $200 billion dollars of produce annually, providing the US with the most plentiful food basket and least expensive food bill in the world.

Well, certainly having an affordable and abundant food supply is critical to the national security of this country. We’ve never had to go to war for shortage of food like most countries in the world have. So, it gives our country a kind of a leg up that we are a food sufficient society.

The farmer’s job is complex. Feed the world, protect the environment, provide inexpensive food, and stay in business. Greg managers 3,000 acres. His hours depend on the needs of the land and the crops it produces.

Here is basically a typical farming operation of this part of the country. Wheat, milo, beans, beef cattle.

Like the cycle of life at the crop city grows, Greg is engaged in a never-ending repetition of preparation, planting, nurturing, and harvesting. In this program we'll see just what Greg's yearly tasks are like. Greg starts by using a tractor infield conditioner to prepare his land for planting. The Johansson family’s rich farming heritage dates back many generations. But the origins of farming date back 10,000 years.

Agriculture allowed for everything. You couldn't have urban populations, you couldn't have stable populations. Before that people were chasing after animals they were moving around a lot, they were foraging.

Ancient agronomists learned to break up the soil with digging sticks in preparation for seeding. Around 3500 BC Egyptians created a wooden wedge-shaped implement, tipped with an iron share or blade to cut a trough [trɔf] in the earth. They hitched their plough to oxen. In in the 11th century Europeans added a mound board behind the share to turn the soil over once it was broken.

I’m proud of several things. First of all, turned under crop residue ['rezɪdjuː] it opens up the soil and thirdly, it it's used for weed control.

In the newly-established United States people expanded westward, displaced natives and established homesteads. The rich soil in the mid-west prompted a design change of the ancient implement. The cast iron plows, popular for the sandy soil back-east just couldn't cut it.

The problem was that the soil would stick to the plow and they had to stop every so often and clean the dirt off the board before they could proceed. In 1837 John Deer, Illinois blacksmith found the inspiration for a better plough when visiting a local sawmill. He noticed a broken steel saw blade that was highly polished from use. Deer took the saw blade and fashioned it into a plough. When finished he went around demonstrating his plough’s amazing properties.

As it was pulled through the ground, the steel would polish and become very slick and then he stuck a wooden stick to it. Well, this was quite a revolution in the development of the plough in that particular part of the country. By 1855 John Deer was selling 13,000 ploughs a year. The John Deere agricultural empire was born. In the mid eighteen hundreds 55% of the Americans lived on farms. Farming was a back-breaking enterprise, even with the aid of horses. But a new invention would begin to change that.

The tractor was probably the most significant agricultural innovation of the 20^th century. The tractor allowed farmers to get rid of approximately 23 million draft animals: horses and mules. To feed these animals required approximately eighty million acres of cropland and another eighty million acres in a pasture land.

The first traction engines or ‘tractors’, were steam-powered. These monstrous machines were built like locomotives, burning coal, water, straw to produce steam that drove the wheels. They consumed enormous amounts of water and fuel, but produced relatively little power. For the most part steam tractor stayed on the sidelines and ran stationary devices. But the role of the tractor began to change with the advent the gasoline engine, an elite eighteen hundreds. The company founded on polished steel ploughs expanded its product line.

John Deer purchased the Waterloo gasoline traction company in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1880 and that was a tremendous move. They saw the future course was going to be tractors powered by gasoline engines instead of horse power.

Weighing tons less, yet having comparable horsepower, the gasoline tractor snuffed out the fire-breathing steam engines and put a lot of animals out to pasture.

In the 1920s and 1930s there were organized campaigns, quite substantial campaigns trying to defend the horse and delay or stop the spread of the tractors. It was an organization, called the Horse Association of America. One of the things the Horse Association of America did was they set up a lot a tests with tractors and horses to show that horses where more efficient and, at least in some cases, when the temperature was very hot, they overworked their horses and the animals didn't survive the test. Tractors meant larger farms and fewer farmers. Tractors employ shredded the prairie, helping to feed an increasing metropolitan population. But the combination of tractor ploughing drought [draut] led to the dust bowl of the 1930s. The plough broke the virgin sod and tight root structure that protected the underlying soil. The soil was now susceptible to the fierce prairie wind, leading to one of the greatest ecological disasters in history. Clouds of dust overtook 150,000 square miles of Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, and Kansas.

The dirty 30s is the first time I remember “Don't know what's coming up but it sure is black”. It was dust.

In response farmers look for alternative implements they didn't leave the soil is vulnerable. New farming techniques, conservation efforts and rain helped settle the dust. In the 20th century the tractor became the cornerstone of farming. Manufacturers introduced improvements: hydraulics to raise and lower machinery, power take-offs to run equipment, and the luxury of a cab.

Sound guard body was an integral part of the tractor, which enclosed the operator. It kept the noise out. All fully air-conditioned, tremendous visibility around the tractor, it really focused on operator comfort and convenience.

Costing more than 200,000 $, today the largest tractors run 425 horsepower diesel motors. Some even have tracks. Bohema’s four-wheel-drive has nearly every comfort of home. Since farmers can spend 14 hours a day, six days a week on the tractor, it is home.

People think it's boring when you’re in a tractor. I mean, there’s nobody to talk to. While you are on the track, it’s just peaceful. I’m thinking about what you could do maybe next year.

Greg Johansson's ground is conditioned and ready for seeding. His next task will be planting. Coming up – seed. As technologically amazing as the equipment, what a great deal more controversial. There are close to $1 billion acres of farmland in the United States.

Greg Johansson manages the family farm with his two brothers, Mike and Tom. After tilling the land its planting season, and Greg readies his equipment to saw wheat. Greg’s Green Drill opens a small trench in the earth, drops seeds at precise increments and at exact depths, then covers the seed with dirt. Greg’s drill is just the latest incarnation of planting machinery and methods. By comparison to the plow the planner is a relatively new invention that up into the eighteen hundred's the planting corn, for instance, was a still very intensive labour involved in individual farmer carving a hole into the field with his hoe and then dropping individual seeds into those holes, recovering them.

In the early 1700s Jethro Tull, an English lawyer, invented a mechanical seed drill for planting. His device planted in neat rows for easy weeding ended a uniform depth which Tull discovered was important to the health of the plant. Inventions like Tull’s revolutionized the way people grew crops and cared for the ground. That environment-farmer partnership endures today.

You've got to take care of your land, or the land’s gonna take care of you. That’s the way I look at it.

Greg's father Robert retired years ago. But like many aging farmers he can’t slow down. He’s seen more than fifty years of change. Technological innovation hasn't been restricted to machinery. Arguably the biggest change in agriculture came with the increased use of chemical fertilizer in the mid-twentieth century. As the crop grows nutrients are depleted from the soil, and must be replenished for a healthy crop next year. The concept is a very old one. Ancient Chinese used animal manure, the Romans used bird manure and garbage compost. Native Americans taught the pilgrims how to grow maize by burying a fish beside the planted seeds. In 1842 an English agriculturalist, John Laws produced a fast-pace fertilizer by breaking down animal bones with sulfuric acid. After World War I companies producing synthetic nitrate for explosives shifted to making nitrogen fertilizer. In the 1950’s companies introduced inexpensive fertilizers which ignited a green revolution. Yields skyrocketed.

In the decades that followed the introduction of inexpensive fertilizers, yields tripled. And more food has historically been the goal of agriculture. But the fertilizer wasn't the only reason for higher yields. Seed changed. Hybrid corn introduced in the 1920’s produced bigger bodies.

The ancestor of corn was called P.O.Simpty. This is what corn was before our foremothers got a hold of it 10,000 – 15,000 years ago and over, you know, fifteen millennia of artificial selection they turned this into this.

In today's biotechnological world scientists can alter plant characteristics almost overnight. Genetically modified or GM crops result from a technology that is as controversial as it is powerful. Scientists now move specific genes from one organism into another.

Some the genes that we’re putting in to plants come from organisms they're not plants, come from animals or bacteria. Why is that possible? Why is that not unnatural? Well, it’s possible because DNA, nucleic acids are the language of life, that’s a universal language. Every organism on the planet uses these compounds to encode their hereditary characteristics. There's nothing in a gene which says ‘I belong in a strawberry, I belong in a fish. If found in a corn plant, you know, please return to owner.’ The living world isn't like that.

Proponents of the new technology promise higher yielding crops, decreased reliance on chemical pesticides and herbicides, and plants with higher nutritional values.

It's not a substitute for working on poverty and the other issues that are causing people to be malnourished. But, if you have only a limited budget and you have to eat a certain type a commodity and we can modify in such a way, it has higher nutrition. It seems really virtually immoral not to do it. I mean, why not do that?

Seed companies swear to the benefits and safety of GM food, but opponents call them Franken Foods. The concern group believe there could be unforeseen health risks, including the accidental introduction of unknown allergens into common food.

The development of regulations and the widespread use of genetically modified crops is going ahead at a rate much faster than our ability to assess the risks associated with it. In fact there's very little good risk assessment that has been done in terms of understanding some of the ecological consequences of the material that is already very widely grown. Never mind the next generations that are getting ready to be put into production

Of course, we have to be sure they're safe, we have to test that but they are certainly as safe as the genetic engineering we've been doing for the last 100 years.

The debate regarding genetically modified foods may be heated but with more than 45 GM crops on the market chances are you're consuming them right. Back at the farm, Greg Johansson's crop is growing. It's the most vulnerable time of the year. A host of assailants could wipe out his hard work. 35% of corn and 55% of soybeans produced in the US in 1999 for genetically modified.

Greg Johansson has completed planting his crops. But he doesn't sit back and wait for harvest. As the crops grow, Greg's battling insects, weeds, and even the weather.

You can have a perfect year growing and you think you've got it made. And in an hour time a hailstorm has got you clean on, and it's completely gone.

There’s no business that is more prone to natural disaster than agriculture. I mean, you know, just imagine, if you run a business outside with items that you are producing that could be destroyed overnight. It could be a flood or hurricane a tornado, a hailstorm or a drought. If the weather doesn't get Greg's crops, insects might. In the mid-twentieth century scientists created extremely effective chemical herbicides to kill weeds, and pesticides to kill insects. Yields jumped. One of the most infamous pesticides is DDT. A swiss chemist Paul Müller discovered DDT insect killing properties in 1939. DDT was extensively used during World War II by both the civilian and military population to control lights, mosquitoes, and other insects. Malaria cases dropped from 75 million incidents a year 5 million in less than a decade. It was so effective farmers started using DDT after the war. Farmers of the US used 1.2 million pounds of DDT between 1950 in 1972. In 1948 doctor Müller won a Nobel Prize for his work. The benefits of DDT were obvious. But the properties that made DDT work so well as a pesticide also made it an environmental poison. DDT is easily absorbed, and is slow to break down in the soil. In 1962 Rachel Carson’s book “Silent spring” reported DDT killed fish and birds. Other studies link DDT to cancer. Her bestseller prompted a White House report calling for new federal regulations. Finally in 1972 the US government banned DDT. But the overuse of other chemicals produced similar negative effects.

I think we're in trouble. Really are. And sometimes I think we need just to back up a little bit, take it a little bit slower. Remember what our parents taught us and not go overboard on this pesticide bit.

Today most farmers hire licensed professionals to apply the pesticide and herbicide products the regulatory agencies deemed safe. Ironically the same companies that make pesticides and herbicides are creating genetically modified crops that require less chemical. Seed companies introduced corn that generates its own pesticide. Derived from a soil bacterium Bacillus Thuringiensis, Bt corn cells are toxic to the corn borer pests that eat it.

You no longer have to spray to eliminate that insect and most of those insecticides are the ones that we really don't wanna fool with. We don't want the residues in the crop. It's a boon to me and it's a boon to the consumer.

Seed companies also promote herbicide-resistant soybeans that requires less herbicide. But like other GM issues, there's debate.

There is a great number of unanswered questions. This technology has not been tested. Irregardless of what the FDA and EPA have but a rubber stamp on, they use for the most part information that the genetic engineering company supplied to them.

The environmental watchdogs worry about insects developing resistance to genetic pesticides, killing non-target insects or cross-pollination between GM plants and weeds, producing uncontrollable herbicide-resistant weeds. Furthermore there's concern about gene patents granted to the seed companies.

I think biotechnology can provide a way to produce crops with less water, less energy, less pesticides. But I also think we've got to do a very good job regulating this to protect public health and the environment as well. And I think you can do both.

An alternative to GM food is organic. Organic foods are not genetically modified crops, grown without chemical fertilizer, pesticide or herbicide. The demand for organic foods has doubled in the last ten years. The University of California Santa Cruz runs one of the oldest organic research departments in the US. Here researchers develop non-chemical techniques to help farmers grow crops and control pests.

A lot of it is about managing the farm habitat to encourage beneficial insects that will suppress the populations of pests, and that may involve planting particular on crops next to each other. It may involve planting a particular vegitation around the field’s margins. I think as a society we have to think about how to encourage farming practices that don’t cause environmental problems and find a way of encouraging farmers to use those, even if it costs more. So that we don't as a society then face the possibly any other problems later.

Applying that research is Mark Marino. Mark works for Earthbound farm. Their ten thousand acres represent one of the largest organic farms in the US. Without the aid of chemicals organic farming requires a lot more attention and manpower than conventional farming. Mark applies 20 to 30 tons of compost for an acre every year to fertilize the earth. Plants are like people. If you have a good diet you will not be as susceptible to flu or cold germs and plants are very much like that. If you can feed the soil and make a smorgasbord of really nice nutrients in the soil that the plant can take in, then they will have to be healthy and they will not have the tendency to be sick and that’s what the bugs attack, it’s the survival of the fittest.

Organic products make up about 1% of the market. Prices tend to be higher but many consumers are willing to pay. Even if it tastes better and seems safer, some say organic farming can’t produce the inexpensive food and expanding world requires. Although banned in the United States approximately two dozen countries continue to use DVD to control malaria

The Johansson brothers prepare the combine, a giant machine used for harvesting grain. They're fortunate. It looks like a bumper crop. Grain farmers in the midwest rely on big equipment for the job. This one 150,000 $ combine is a food processing plant on wheels, cutting, rushing and cleaning grain in one slick operation. The machine devours 36 foot something of grain, reeling it in and sharing the stocks. The cut green enters the bowls of the machine, where beater heads pound the seed from the stock. Vibrating sieves sent grain to a holding bent, while refuse has passed out the back. The operator rides in the camp of the combine where a host of sensors tell him everything from shaft speed too bin volume

The modern combine didn't appear until| the early 20th century. Before that the three functions – cutting, threshing and cleaning were done with separate devices.

The scythe was a blade in long handle. Eventually farmers attached cradles to the sides to catch wheat, increasing productivity. A person came behind the scythe and manually bound wheat into something for threshing. The back-breaking work had remained basically the same for thousands of years. But the farmer got a break when Cyrus McCormick introduced his mechanical Reaper in the 1830’s. The horse-drawn device mowed down wheat using a reciprocating saw. Mechanization revolutionized harvesting. But McCormick’s device only cut the weed. The next step involved separating the grain from the straw. Farmers in the mid-1800s started using a mechanical pressure the reduced labour even more. The thresher had a series a rotating teeth that stripped the seed from the stock.

The case company continued improving threshing technology. Steam-powered threshing machines were prevalent into the nineteen thirties. Men fed cut wheat into the thresher, which mechanically beat the grain free from the straw. Sieves from the fans separated grain from chaff, expelling straw out of something and grain out the other. Farming took one more gigantic leap forward with the invention on the combined harvester thresher, a machine, capable of both cutting and separating.

The first combines in the late 1800s were horse-drawn. It took an enormous amount of power to pull the complicated mechanisms. All of the cutting, threshing and separating functions depended on gearing, attached to the wheels. 40 animals might be used. Tractor power made things easier in the 1900s and around 1910 manufacturers introduced self-propelled combines. A crew of 10 to 15 people was replaced by one man and one machine. The combine had an effect on the farm similar to the tractor. Farm size grew while farm population shrank. More people moved off the farm and into the city. In the 20th century combines became more comfortable, sophisticated and productive.

Custom cutters are wandering bends of men and machines who spend as much as nine months a year cutting grain for hire. Following the progression harvest from Texas north into Canada.

The average crew maintains 2-6 combines with matching grain trucks and trailers. An outfit might have more than one million dollars of equipment. Custom cutters swoop into an area, cut for a few days then move north into a new region. In a flash the grain’s and they're ready to go.

Now you load this combine on a trailer, the combine weighs over 20,000 pounds, the truck weighs 20,000 pounds the trailer weighs 10,000 pounds. The tires on the combine even after you’ve taken the heater off are 14 feet wide, just a massive kinetic energy waiting for an accident lf if you will.

Most farmers own a combine and cut their own grain. The machinery is expensive and commodity prices are low. For every dollar spent at the grocery store the farmer only gets 10 to 20 cents. Farmers have to manage more acreage to make a profit and smaller farmers are finding it harder and harder to survive

You have a bumper crop and then you turn around and look price for the prop and you're wondering how you're gonna make it to the next one. And that’s the big letdown. Knowing that you don't have any more money than you had a year ago. You hope that you can stretch enough pay the billsI.

It's been a good get exhausting year on the Johansson farm. But Greg can’t rest. He's already back in the tractor preparing for the coming planting season and looking forward to next year. Every year equipment and technology change. Greg's neighbor already has the latest global positioning system and computer yield monitor. Greg knows to survive he will have to invest as well. In 1900, 41% of the US population were farmers. Today 2% farm the land.

The Johansson brothers are finishing harvest. They're taking the final loads of wheat to the grain elevator, rising from the flat prairie landscape stamped old white storage structures that can hold 200 million pounds of grain. Grain is unloaded and stored until food companies buy it to make bread, crackers for pizza crust. Greg sells his heat and keeps track of income versus operating expenses on a computer. Like the rest of the world farming has undergone a technological revolution in the last twenty years. Greg's neighbor Li Schaeffer is on the forefront of technology. He’s equipped his machinery with global positioning receivers. These GPS guided sprayer tells him exactly where he's been and what he has left to cover. This helps them avoid over spring and wasting chemicals. GPS is the technology behind a new way of farming called site-specific, or precision agriculture. Precision agriculture treats the field not as one unit but as many smaller units with different needs, by taking soil samples, performer gets an electronic map of the nutrient requirements for the field as they vary within the field.

This is a prescription specifically for that field that tells you that the northwest corner gets more fertilizer than the southwest corner, so the rate is continually changing. The application rate will be changing automatically based on this map this computer and GPS.

Lee also uses GPS during harvest. His yield monitor which tells how much grain he’s cutting is compared against his GPS location.

The yield monitor is the report card if you will. How did this field perform not on a whole field basis which we gather by simply weighing everything that went off the field but how did it to perform in different areas of the field.

If the tractor has a map of the field and with GPS knows where it is within the field why can’t the track to run itself? Trimble navigation is making that a reality.

The autopilot system allows for satellite navigation control on the tractors going across the field. It takes control over the steering and the hydraulics so that the operator has a hands off the operation with the guidance just takes over in runs the tractor by itself. This frees the operator up to monitoring equipment, reduce the stress and makes it fun to operate the tractor in the cab.

The Trimble system is accurate down to an inch. But a person can’t just point the tractor in the direction of the field and let it go. The sophisticated system is designed to help the operator drive straight lines

Benefits to driving straight lines would include the operator's ability to drive even at night. Chemicals are more efficiently apply because there are no gaps are double coverage between passes. Every technological innovation is helping farmers produce more food.

What’s easy to forget his that we live in a very unusual age, in which Americans for the most part do not worry about starvation on their doorstep. You don’t have to go back very far in history in which most people we're worried about where they were gonna get enough the and famines were a regular fact of life. Now in developed countries like Western Europe. And it’s also easy to forget that much of the world hasn't passed that threshold. We've seen all the technological change in the last 150 years and particularly the last 50 years. I guess my view is that it's not going to stop if anything it's going to accelerate. This means that productivity is gonna continue going up means that there will be fewer farmers. Farmers have to compete with non-farmers to keep their sons on the farm if they don't and means the sons will go off, become engineers and technicians and university professor. I just think that's a losing battle.

After college Greg was the only Johansson brother who came back to work full-time on the farm. The farm couldn't support three families. Low farm prices let the others to pursue alternative careers.

I didn't have enough for all three boys to each have a farm. I'd like to see one of them being able to farm on his own but there’s just no way that would work. And whether it'll work after I'm gone, I don’t know. That’s up to them.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-04