My wife and I are living at my parents’ house right now (and we may still be here by the time you read this). Our farmhouse is undergoing a renovation that requires the water to be shut off for up to two weeks, so we opted to leave. My parents are in Arizona, so the timing worked out.
My parents, like most people, have a house that is equipped with a thermostat. Big deal, I know. But, wait for it. There is a point to this story. Their thermostat is digital, but it is not Wi-Fi-enabled, meaning I cannot change the temperature from the couch using my phone and my parents cannot change the temperature from Arizona. Our thermostat on the farm can do these things, and we not only appreciate the convenience, but we also are entitled brats and expect it wherever we are staying — millennials (apparently, Jamie and I are “geriatric millennials”).
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I won’t speak for Jamie, but I think more people should have Wi-Fi-enabled thermostats.
I think about technology a lot. My professional life as a consultant has only amplified this infatuation and it has justified many expenditures, all of which I have — or will — use for work. I have a camera that shoots 360-degree video and still photographs (really cool stuff to view wearing VR goggles). I have a GoPro, a drone and two DSLRs (for camera gear junkies, this list is nothing). When I suit up and prepare to capture something, people must wait for me to slip the chest mount over my jacket, the head mount over my toque and then witness me commission help jamming a selfie-stick between my jacket and my back for the 360-degree camera to perch atop of. There is always a lot of eye-rolling.
This all changes, however, when, later that same day, I send them the finished video.
The cameras and lenses and other pieces of technology I use to create products allow me to do so to a level that the industry has come to expect. This bar is constantly rising. The onus to recognize that and find ways to reach it is on me.
I have experience with consumer technologies. I don’t have as much with agricultural technologies. But, philosophically, they are not dissimilar. There is technology available to all of us farmers that could make our operations better (I realize that “better” is a loaded term. For the purposes of this column, please just use your guttural definition of it).
Often, I get the impression that people think of technologies like, say, Wi-Fi thermostats or 360-degree cameras as frivolous — easily written off as things reserved for materialists with extra money. If this is where your head is at on the issue, would it change things for you if I said that you could put a Wi-Fi thermostat in your home for the same price as what it would cost to replace your current one?
Unlike many of my other columns, this one is going to remain inconclusive. This is merely exploratory. I am merely pressure testing the hypothesis that the standards and expectations of a given sector are contingent on the kinds of technologies available to it, and the hypothesis that what keeps many of us from implementing current technologies is the erroneous notion that they are inaccessible to either our farm size or our financial situations.
There would be no good excuse for me to operate our farm using the same equipment the people who settled it used. My seed handling capabilities wouldn’t meet specifications. My germination rates would be too low to justify today’s seed costs and there just wouldn’t be enough time in the growing season for me to get everything done.
Considering the thermostat analogy, I could do a better job of identifying agricultural technologies that may enhance my operation — inching it upwards along an ever-increasing benchmark — without costing me as much as I think.
Real, honest research goes into some of the tech available to farmers. This, as you know, isn’t true across the board and it should be stated that I am not endorsing the purchase of all new technologies that you can afford. Discernment over any piece of tech’s usefulness and/or feasibility in your life and on your farm is still critical.
Before we leave here and go back to our home, I may just install such a thermostat as a way of saying thanks for letting us stay here. Also, did I just convince myself to buy an air seeder?
