“Hey, I’d love to stay and chat, but I have a column to write this morning,” I said.

“Okay. No problem. What are you going to be writing about?” asked Santschi.

I gave him the elevator pitch about what I was planning to cover in my column. He asked a few more clarifying questions. I could hear/see that he was working on something. He was typing. This is not especially interesting, as we’re all guilty of multitasking while on Zoom calls.

“How many words are your columns, generally?”

Okay. His level of interest in my writing was starting to pique my interest. What was he up to?

No longer than a minute into this peculiar and out-of-character exchange about my writing topic, he sends me a text file. It was an 800-word column anchored on the brief description I gave him.

He told an artificial intelligence-powered content generator to write an 800-word article on the topic I gave him. It did so in under one minute and that is what he sent to me. That was what he was doing behind the scenes.

The article was good. It was clean. It was well written. It was relevant to a Canadian ag audience and it included considerations that showed real insight into the ag industry. I could have submitted that, and I am not entirely certain my editor would have noticed that a computer wrote it.

To add to the strange nightmarish reality AI represents, I asked Santschi if he could ask the software to re-write the same piece in the style of Toban Dyck. It did. And it did a scary good job of it.

If you know me, you know that I enjoy technology, from actual pieces of gadgetry to its philosophical/societal implications.

The natural response to this kind of technology is fear over its ability to replace humans. Why would anyone hire me as a writer if algorithms can scour all the words, all the information, and all the sentence structures that exist on the internet and generate quality content?

My response to this is nuanced. I believe that for some things, some projects, it may make more sense to solicit the service of bots. And I think that’s okay. For a business owner to use AI to generate website copy or a LinkedIn post is perfectly acceptable in some instances. There are like a million caveats I want to put on this AI endorsement, but for the sake of time, I’ll just say use it as long as doing so is within the bounds of reason.

In February, I spoke at the Ag Awareness Summit in Saskatoon. On my way there, while waiting in the airport, I got AI to write me an ag policy recommendation related to environmental sustainability.

Not only did it write something that seemed to be new (as in, it generated the idea), it did so in the correct format, including a reference page that included reputable research documents.

When I spoke about this at the conference, a professor, who spoke with me after my presentation, said that there are already programs being used by universities that can detect whether or not student submissions were created using artificial intelligence.

It doesn’t scare me to think of a computer being able to write as well as I can. Not at all. More so, I believe that being afraid of this kind of technology instead of taking the time to develop a deeper understanding of it is tantamount to bowing out on a trajectory agriculture and the rest of society has been on for quite some time.

AI-produced articles of passable quality may seem very now and like a bit too much to handle, but the writing has been on the wall for some time.

People anthropomorphize things. We tend to talk about things in uniquely human ways, because we are human and we associate the creation of an article or column with the act of writing. When a computer generates an article, we say it wrote said article, bestowing upon it human characteristics. This, in turn, terrifies us, even though we are the ones attributing those values to it.

AI does not write things in the human sense. The processes used by AI software to create products, such as articles, can and should be explained in terms of what they actually are. I don’t know what they are, but I am guessing they are complex and linear in ways that are characteristically not human, like, say, a series of beeps and boops that only make sense to a handful of engineers.

Perhaps the human brain and what it generates can be fully explained in much the same way complex computer systems can, but that’s not for this column to debate.

For now, as I have said many times — and will continue to — we should do our best to make sense of these things instead of letting them terrify us.

There is a lot of technology coming down the pipe for agriculture. Some of it will be good. Some of it will be ineffective, and most of it will need tweaking. The industry will rely upon those bold enough to understand instead of run to be its technology gatekeepers, whistleblowers and judges.

Besides, I am terrible at editing my own work, so if a computer can write my first draft in the style of Toban Dyck, then perhaps I can dive in and make it better than something I would have been able to write on my own.

The post Toban Dyck: This column could’ve been written by AI appeared first on Grainews.

This work by Simon Winchester is one of my favourite reads and it galvanized in me a deeper appreciation for language, the subjective nature of meaning and how the definitions we either explicitly or implicitly attribute to words changes rapidly.

I don’t want to write about sustainability, but I have to. It is the thing, the elephant in the room, the topic of every panel at every farm show, the focus of every organization, the commitment of all levels of government. Ignoring the word and its governing role in agriculture would be foolish.

That said, like most farmers in North America, and, perhaps, the world, I have heard and read the word “sustainability” too many times. Its power as a vehicle for change is diminishing as a result.

I don’t often walk up to the mic following panels at farm events. I am a backbencher, a writer. Most talks on sustainability are not interesting. They consist of calls for farmers to take the concept seriously if Canada is to stay in good standing with its current spate of crop customers. Fine.

They talk about looming and current government policies and how if farmers don’t take control of changing their own practices, Trudeau will do it for them. Again. Fine.

Also, these sustainability talks often appeal to emotion with pledges to keep the farm in good shape for future generations, and, for me, this seems out of character for many ag events.

It’s like going to a hockey game, expecting to see a known collection of people play the sport of hockey and being gobsmacked by the two minutes of soccer they’ve incorporated into their game.

At first, you don’t believe it. Then, you’re disgusted by it. You become angry over what you believe is an abomination of a sport that was perfectly fine without Connor McDavid kicking around a soccer ball for a few minutes every game.

Then, after months of seeing it during every game, you accept the changes that have been made to the sport you grew up loving, but you change the channel when they play soccer because you know they’re not very good at it.

I sometimes cringe and/or walk out of the room during panel discussions on the topic of sustainability. They tend to sound more like government relations jargon than content that will move the agricultural needle in the direction it needs to move.

Farmers need to improve, but show us that using data and graphs, and through ways that make sense and are clear. Ag shouldn’t play soccer when hockey is what it’s trained to play.

I believe that industry needs to put the word “sustainability” on the products and policies it produces. That is political. I believe that my practices on the farm could and should improve and likely yours could and should, as well. That is tangible sustainability.

I also believe that continued talk of sustainability has become a veil over the growing chasm between agronomic research, complicated government policies and technical analysis and farmers.

I believe farmers would be more sustainable if they better understood and had better access to the information their own industry is generating than if they believed in the concept of sustainability or not.

Should we continue talking about sustainability, unpacking the concept in large convention-like settings, or should we be presenting data, research and analysis in clearer ways that serve to build capacity among farmers, like myself, to better utilize the large pool of resources available to us?

Sustainability — the ability something has to sustain itself over a long period of time — is not underpinned by emotion or a philosophical trend/concept, it is based on data, on facts.

Treating it as a concept, as I have heard done time after time, is not doing it any favours, especially among an older generation that connects such things to movements that threaten their values and their capitalism.

I can’t name one farmer who thinks his or her operation should only last for one generation. I can, however, name at least 12 farmers who routinely scoff at the word sustainability.

Language and etymology are interesting. If anything, these two areas of study tell us that words and their definitions are not sustainable. They change.

Perhaps we should define sustainability in two ways — one for farmers and the other for industry.

Farmer definition: the optimal utilization of current research and data.

Industry definition: the clear and confirmed conveyance of current research and data to farmers.

The post Toban Dyck: Ag shouldn’t play soccer when hockey is what it’s trained to play appeared first on Grainews.

This summer, a baby fox seeking refuge in a tree caught my attention, pigeons in an Edgar Allan Poeish scene of gray bins on a dreary day, our dog with me on the field, bees doing their amazing and fascinating work and a turtle scurrying away from the lens toward the water.

Editor’s note: Do you have a photo essay you’d like to submit for consideration? Please email photos and captions to kbelanger@farmmedia.com.

The post PHOTOS: Midsummer creatures on the farm appeared first on Grainews.

But I can also rest assured knowing that you likely do this, too.

Since before the pandemic, I’ve had my beady gaze set on a truck with a very specific set of specs. I test drove one of them in, I want to say, 2018 or 2019, but dithered too long and lost the sale (it was probably for the better — high kilometres, if I recall).

Fast-forward to November 2022, which, as I write this, is now. My wife and I have just returned from a road trip that was rife with question marks and was, ultimately, such a smooth success that I couldn’t have scripted it better myself if this tale was a fictional one.

What does this have to do with agriculture? A lot. But you’ll have to endure my story first.

I messaged Bryon before calling him. The ad had Kamloops, B.C., as the location. He had just listed a 4×4 2012 Toyota Tacoma in “mint shape” with only 108,000 kilometres, a manual transmission and green in colour. This met my search criteria. It did more than that, actually. It was a unicorn.

After messaging him, waiting 60 seconds and getting no response, I decided to call him.

We chatted. We hit it off. He bought it new and pampered it.

We flew into Kamloops on one-way tickets just before midnight on a Friday carrying a certified cheque and no plan B.

We stayed at a cheap motel, and we were scheduled to meet Bryon the next morning to see the truck for the very first time.

We had breakfast, walked over to his place and found him in his backyard loading the truck box with the extra tires, rims and parts that he included in the sale.

The truck was running. It appeared as it did on the ad and there were no red flags, except he wanted to take the cheque to his bank on his own and then he’d meet us at the insurance place to sign the bill of sale and help me get the documents I’d need to drive it to Manitoba.

The other red flag was he didn’t have the truck registered, so I couldn’t legally test drive it.

When Jamie and I backed it out of his yard, having given him the money and obtaining the required permits, we were driving it for the first time.

Bryon was trustworthy throughout the process. The truck drove wonderfully through the myriad of systems the Rockies threw at us and then continued to treat us well as we drove for 20 hours under the sometimes hostile canopy of an Alberta clipper.

I paid a lot for this truck, but after years of looking, I knew exactly what I was looking for, exactly what prices were fair and what signals to watch for in shady sellers.

And, earlier today, when I got the truck safetied for registration in Manitoba, the mechanic said to me, “That is a nice truck. The previous owner obviously took good care of it. It’s going to last you for a while.”

The point is this. For those who’ve been working in the ag sector for a while and who’ve had the privilege of occupying a variety of roles within it, like knowing a good deal when you see one, the ag policy gaps are likely clear. You search for good news for ag and when you find it, you know it, but when there’s poor substance under glossy coating, you pick up on that just as quickly.

Perhaps the analogy is about the value of time and patience. Perhaps it’s about the sector doing a better job of finding and engaging those with such a keen sense of things.

There are gaping holes in the ag sector. Ag policy across the provinces — at least the Prairie provinces — is undersupported. National groups are having a hard time servicing their provincial members, as their operational models don’t really allow for the kind of attention each one would require.

If a seller on Kijiji gets too pushy, I’ll walk away. I have a long list of signs that send me packing. We all do. We all have a sense of things. Don’t forget about them. Don’t think you’re off base. Some of these gaps in Canadian agriculture are so large and have been left alone for so long they are being forgotten. Perhaps those who feel like they noticed it at first have now either forgotten or lost faith in their instincts.

There’s value in searching for the same thing over a long period of time. If I was talking about something other than a truck, there’s a chance we’d call such a thing a pilgrimage. 

The post On trucks, ag policy and pilgrimages appeared first on Grainews.

I’m seeding barley on a 90-acre parcel in the Red River Valley. I have exactly four minutes and five seconds of writing time between turns at each end of the field.

(turn)

I look back once in a while to make sure the seeder is, in fact, still doing the one thing it’s supposed to be doing.

Will I have enough seed in the seed tender to finish this field? How much will be left over and what will I do with it? If I finish late, will I bring the seeder/tractor rig home and come back tomorrow for the tender, or vice versa? How will I get done all the things this highly irregular seeding season has pushed down the list?

(turn, that one was close — almost hit the boundary berm)

A friend of mine just stopped by, so we chatted on the field (about farming-related things) for a while.

I’m watching menacing clouds roll towards me from the west. The air has changed in the last hour or so. It feels like foul weather may be afoot.

(turn and fill seeder)

I’m thinking about my niece’s dance recital that I’m unable to attend in order to finish seeding. I don’t like missing such events and I struggle to believe putting a crop in is more important than family and friends. But this seeding season, more than any other in my memory, has been one I desperately want/need to complete. It’s been irregular in ways I haven’t had time to fully unpack.

(turn)

Jamie, my wife, has just finished a meeting with her master’s degree advisor and is offering to pick up food at a local drive-in.

(looking up menu)

“Spicy chipotle chicken burger, fries and a vanilla milkshake, please.”

My phone battery is at 26 per cent and service is spotty on this field. I’ve dropped numerous calls on it today.

I’ll aim to finish this column before plugging in my cell and resuming my audiobook The Library Book by Susan Orlean, which recounts the 1986 fire at the central library in Los Angeles. It’s quite interesting.

(turn)

The clouds are gone. The menacing ones, anyway. The fury they unleashed amounted to no more than a few drops on the windshield.

At this point in the evening — nearing dance recital time — I am getting regular updates from my parents, who are currently waiting in line at the theatre. I’ve received a picture of my niece’s dress from my mom and my dad is finding it challenging to be away from the farm while I am seeding. I know this because I am receiving regular texts from him.

“How’s it working?”

“It’s working very well.”

(turn)

“Do you think you’ll finish tonight?”

“I do.”

Dad responds with two thumbs-up emojis and two wide-smile emojis.

(turn)

The outside temperature is starting to drop. The air conditioning in the cab is starting to feel chilly.

(plugged run — drove through a muddy area)

More clouds have rolled in. More drizzle was produced and has since ended.

“Rain coming your way,” reads a message from my dad.

“I see it. It doesn’t appear threatening.”

(turn and fill)

This may be the last time I fill the seeder this year. The end is in sight. The field is wider at the west end than it is at the east, so it’s hard to tell how much I have left.

A few turns and 30 minutes of audiobook later, I decide to top off the seeder while it’s still light outside. I don’t want to fuss with partial fills at night, if possible. Let’s see if my foresight is accurate.

Roughly two more full rounds and then, maybe, three additional short ones. Again, it’s hard to say.

It’s 8:18 p.m. #plant22 could be done by 9.

(two turns later)

I’m on the shorter runs now and I’m starting to get worried that I didn’t add enough seed during the last partial fill.

It’s soon that fateful time when one has to get out at the end of each run to check seed levels.

(turn and check)

At 8:58 p.m. on June 9, I finish seeding for 2022. I drive home, Jamie and I “cheer” and then it’s off to bed.

The post Better late than never appeared first on Grainews.

Some of the topics I am about to share with you rattle my core. I wrestle with them. I attempt to put them in chokeholds or otherwise subdue them, so they don’t interfere with my life and prevent me from advancing through a workday.

What I am about to say may elicit a strong reaction. It may turn you off from continuing to read. But, and I am pleading here, please continue to the end. Privilege. Have you heard of the word? You likely have. And you likely have some thoughts about it. Fair enough. I do, too.

I am privileged. I am a white male taking over an established farming business. My journalism and writing experiences have allowed me to seamlessly transition to agricultural communications, and I have become a sought-after commodity in that arena.

Do I deserve my success? Yes and no. My wife would say that my success is my charm. I am busier than there is time in a day. Details get forgotten. Accounts billable and accounts payable are rarely current. I’ll finish jobs and complete tasks, but I will rely on the organizational skills of others in order to do so.

Privilege, as I have come to understand it, is me having and using a set of unearned characteristics that give me prejudicial advantage over others, allowing me to be dismissive about the things in my life that I know I need to improve while simultaneously resting assured that those shortcomings will get picked up by others.

Privilege is also getting away with things others wouldn’t and believing that the rules can bend in your direction because “I’m a good person.”

The farming community needs to understand this. So many of us come from tremendous privilege. I could not imagine starting a farm from scratch. My ability to balance the books and run a small farming operation doesn’t hold a candle to the challenges of someone who, because of the colour of their skin, gender, socio-economic status or sexual orientation has had to fight, tooth and nail, to get just a modicum of the attention I can get on any given day.

I am a farmer and a writer. This set of qualifications has taken me quite far. I am grateful. I love it. I really do. But, I am not the only good farmer and writer/communicator. I have and still do work alongside many women, who also share the traits of being both communicators and farmers. My charisma and charm — if I have any at all — is absolutely no match for the skill, patience and capacity I have witnessed in many people, who do not get the opportunities I get.

I have wanted to write about this for quite some time, but I held back because I didn’t have a solution and I would get tripped up trying to reconcile the optics of me, a man of privilege, writing about women and writing about privilege from a place of privilege. I would like to believe that my words here don’t have value because I am a man, but instead because I have an audience in this newspaper.

I also hesitated to share this because what good would it do telling you all of this without some sort of path forward.

I was chatting about this with a colleague of mine. I expressed to her my frustration over realizing just how privileged I am and not knowing what to do about it. She said two words to me and they stuck: “Be better.”

Those words were the solution. I need to be better. When I heard those words and when they finally sunk in, I knew exactly how and where I needed to be better. It’ll be different for you. I know I am privileged, and I know it’s largely for things that, by themselves, have no intrinsic value. I need to stop assuming I have an advantage. I need to be more grateful to those who pick up the pieces around me and I need to develop better tools to communicate in advance with those whose skills complement my deficits.

This analogy could apply to the sector, as a whole, but I think it has more impact on an individual level. If I happen to be wearing a red sweater, it is my hope that when I get fast-tracked to the start of the line, I’ll know that it’s prejudicial, baseless and in no way makes me better than those whose sweaters happen to be a different colour.

The post Toban Dyck: We’re not all wearing red sweaters appeared first on Grainews.

Or, has the visage of the modern farmer moved away from a representation of hard physical labour to something more resembling cunning, strategy and business savvy?

I ask because this question came up in a significant way for me the other day. The person with whom I was chatting expressed disappointment — if not something stronger altogether — that most agricultural publications portray farmers and farm families in a way he believes doesn’t necessarily represent reality.

The picture of a family standing in a field, kids sitting on bales, tight jeans on everyone too old to sit on bales, baseball caps, belt buckles and smiles may be getting a tad stale. At least, that was the sentiment I was picking up on.

He likely knew I would agree with him. And I did. This stale, overused tableau always got under my skin.

I work in communications. I have taken photos used on magazine covers. I have taken the exact photo I am condemning. I am guilty of propagating this farmer stereotype. Ultimately, I am guilty of laziness, leaning on what I know will be accepted rather than taking a risk by capturing images that I feel better represent either the people I am photographing or what it means to be a farm family today.

What will be on the next cover of Manitoba Pulse and Soybean Growers’ Pulse Beat magazine, a publication with which I have been involved for quite some time? I don’t know. But I do know it’s something worth thinking about, especially in this context.

The essence of the farmer

The question/challenge posed to me got me thinking about the kind of picture that would most truthfully resemble the essence of the farmer.

When I moved back to the farm, I would wear the same clothes in the workshop as I had worn the evening before at a restaurant with Jamie, my wife. My jeans would inevitably get grease on them, consigning them to be work pants and nothing else.

My father was and still is a staunch believer in coveralls. I certainly understand the appeal. You can wear whatever you want, adorn coveralls during the dirty part of your day and then, eureka, at the end of the day, shed that filthy layer to reveal attire untouched and pure.

I have had trouble training my brain to appreciate coveralls like they deserve.

Instead, still wearing clothes I should definitely not be working in, I tried to be more intentional about not getting so filthy. This works until it doesn’t. The farm hosts too many products that stain clothes. One brush up against oil or grease and you’ve got a stain that no amount of Resolve will remove.

My latest evolution has yet to be growing-season proven, though it has passed the winter workshop test. I have purchased workwear — pants and jeans meant for rough service. Dickies, Kuhl, etc. — this isn’t about brands, but this is something I have never done before.

A picture of me on the farm in 2012 would be of a person inexplicably covered head to toe in grease, wearing jeans and a shirt that were not meant to get so dirty.

In 2018, same clothes, but remarkably less dirty. Today, I’d be wearing clothes meant for work. I’d likely be wearing thin, grippy work gloves to protect my hands and my face would likely be clean (unless you managed to snag a candid of me after blowing out the combine).

I think these kinds of things are interesting. Farming, as you know, involves a ton of considerations. Clothing and appearance are among those things.

This is not entirely what my friend/colleague was getting at when he raised the question of what kind of picture best captures what it means to be a farmer, but it is, in part, where my mind went.

Agriculture is dynamic. Canadian farmers are a diverse bunch. To an outsider looking in, though, these great attributes, which are deserving of celebration and promotion, are often hidden under a veneer of homogeneity.

I am as homogeneous as they come. I used myself as an example here to, hopefully, poke your brain into conjuring an image of the modern farmer while discussing something practical, like my clothing evolution on the farm.

Think about it. You get an ag magazine in the mail and you remark, “Wow. That picture gets it.” Describe to me that picture. I am very curious. Perhaps our descriptions will serve as revelations of what we really think about the industry in which we work.

The post Toban Dyck: Clothes do not make the man — or do they? appeared first on Grainews.

There is a long list of things our picture of a typical farmer doesn’t do, believe or say. Toss the list. Watching me set up cameras and camera mounts on your tractor and seeding equipment when all you want to do is be productive and get to the field may be incredibly frustrating. However, let’s talk again when I show you the footage.

This column is about preparedness and the benefits of atypical combinations.

My farm has a snowmobile. It has always had one. Every decade or so, it gets replaced. However, two things remain consistent — it’s old and it works well enough to pull a couple of kids (and perhaps a daring adult or two) around the yard on an inflated tractor tube. This is all we’ve ever required of our sled. That is, until this winter, when I summoned my 2004 Arctic Cat 570 out of dormancy for a 120-mile foray through the Manitoba wilderness.

About 30 miles into the forest trails of Nopiming Provincial Park, I spotted it — an adult lynx. I knew there had been sightings in the area, but my hope of seeing one was faint.

Set against this faint hope and the equally faint hope of seeing a moose or a bald eagle, I painstakingly packed a backpack full of camera gear, mounted a GoPro to my chest and clamped a 360-degree video camera to the brake side of my handlebar. It must have been frustrating for the person I was riding with, who was ready to ride long before I was.

It darted across the snowmobile trail and into the woods. I slammed the breaks while simultaneously pulling over and killing the power. I entered a state of hyperfocus. My mission became singular. I needed to prepare for the possibility of seeing a lynx.

I threw my backpack to the ground. I ripped open the top flap and began rummaging around, attempting to quickly detach my landscape lens from my camera body and replace it with the telephoto I’d need if that lynx were to reappear. It was cold. Who knows where I threw my gloves or shed my helmet. I was too focused to think about such non-lynx related things. Of the stuff I thought to pack, I managed to assemble a gear combination best able to capture this rare opportunity.

The snow is quite deep in Nopiming, and I was told later that much of the wildlife in the area prefer walking on the groomed snowmobile trails. The lynx reappeared — on the trail — about 100 feet in front of me. My telephoto is large — like the kind you see on the sidelines at professional sporting events. And it’s quite heavy.

I heaved it up, focused and pressed the trigger. Silence. The shutter did not make a sound. That is because the last time I used the camera, I was taking photographs of the northern lights, which requires the camera to be as still as possible for long periods of time. Not only did I have a two-second timer set between when the shutter button is pressed and the shutter is activated, but I also had my exposure set for 15 seconds.

By the time I had figured all of this out, the lynx had rounded the corner and was a step or two out of sight. I walked towards it, hoping it wouldn’t run away. It didn’t. I took a lot of photos. It was and appeared far away, even at full extension of my telephoto. I had no way of knowing if I was getting photos that were properly focused or had good perspective. I would only know that once I got back to my laptop.

I got the shot.

Taking the time to prepare and pack my gear paid off. I felt vindicated, and I became bent on the idea that, though I was adequately prepared, I could have been more so. I should have double-checked my camera settings before packing it away.

My old sled rose to a challenge that will forever alter this farm’s relationship with the snowmobiles it purchases. It wasn’t about making miles for the two of us riding snowmobiles that day. It was about enjoying the day exactly how we wanted to enjoy it. For me, that involved stopping often to take photos. For my riding partner, it also meant stopping often to follow animal tracks through the forest.

I hope that those who feel stilted or stifled by the moulds they find themselves in read this and understand that being a farmer, or being a farmer in a certain area, doesn’t mean you can’t install a painting easel in your tractor cab in preparation for a breathtaking sunset or whatever atypical idea you’ve always wanted to realize.

The post Toban Dyck: Toss the list, break the mould appeared first on Grainews.

The conception of this project, the validation of completing it and the sheer euphoria of installing it before Jamie got home from school was, packaged together, an experience I want to repeat over and over again. It also represented a waypoint along a learning trajectory of seemingly infinite length and depth.

The shelf was made from steel and wood. I wanted to see if I had it in me to be patient and competent enough to build something precise. I didn’t know it then, but I had taken a tiny step into the vast world of precision fabricators and makers.

About one year ago, I became acquainted with a local grain marketer. Big deal, I know. This person, however, moonlights as a bicycle builder/fabricator. Yes. He makes bicycles, and he does so from scratch.

He would swing by my farm to talk about markets, but chatter would soon bend towards the workshop and what I get up to inside its walls.

I gave him a tour of my space and in broad brushstrokes walked him through how I was working to make it as efficient as possible. He indulged me. In hindsight, his reaction to my workshop show and tell is probably best interpreted as gracious. I would soon learn that his workspace is not only more organized than mine, but it also contains tools and jigs I didn’t know existed.

The shelf that once represented my foray into precision building doesn’t hold a candle to the kinds of work this person can do and does do in his workshop. I wanted those tools. I wanted to be able to do those things.

I started following fabricators on YouTube and Instagram. I scour Kijiji for such things as metal lathes, milling machines, metal benders and belt grinders.

My tendency is to be a mile wide and an inch thick. I trust we’re all familiar with that idiom, which, put crudely, means only knowing a little about a lot. It’s a celebrated, if not required, trait among farmers.

When I began writing this column 10 years ago, I was learning how to farm again after being away for a couple of decades. I brought you along with me. I would write things the established farmer would be too embarrassed to admit he or she didn’t know, covering topics like basis and soil pH.

It resonated with farmers because it allowed them to privately explore topics that they had previously glossed over and perhaps failed to understand in the first place. I get it. You’ll receive no judgment from me. I do this all the time.

I learn enough about a topic to hold my own in a conversation, or, put another way, I can weld well enough to get an implement back on the field. To a person who builds bicycles and whose welds are visible to the end-user, it would not appear as though I know what I am doing.

Knowing a little about a lot is not a negative trait. It’s incredibly effective. But knowing a little about a lot is not the same as expertise. It’s remarkably different.

Presumably, we all make the decision, whether explicitly or implicitly, to stop learning about a given topic or thing. But that’s not the most interesting point to all of this. What is most interesting, at least to me, is our ability to claim authority on subjects we clearly don’t know a lot about.

I did not claim to be an authority on welding before I met the bike builder, but after meeting him, I have tempered how I talk about my metal fabrication skills. They’re there. I can build things. But I am not armed with clear evidence of my deficiencies in that area.

There are analogies to be drawn from this that are relevant to what is happening in the ag sector today. I’ll leave you to make them yourself.

Perhaps it’s just me justifying the sizable gaps in my knowledge base, but I have always been a strong proponent of uncertainty, of grey areas, of the muck. It is, I believe, foundational to meaning and growth.

I will continue down this fabrication rabbit hole for a while. It’s intriguing. I know so little about things and I don’t mind that at all.

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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”).

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?

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