Markets
Kub's Den
Elaine Kub
DTN Contributing Analyst
Wed Sep 30, 2015 08:14 AM CDT
What will farmers do to fill their October days once the robots take over? One hundred years after the first Farmall tractor was shipped to your farm, crops are now being harvested with equipment of such size, speed, and efficiency it would have been inconceivable to your grandfather.
Working the farm has seen a lot of changes over the millennia, and especially in the past 400 years, but farming is not yet to the point where humans are not needed. (Illustration courtesy Library of Congress)
This week's Crop Progress report from USDA showed that, given the mostly favorable weather, farmers were going after soybeans relatively faster than corn (21% of soybeans harvested by Sunday evening, compared to 18% of the nation's corn fields). The reaping of the Corn Belt's row crops is a process that typically spreads out across eight weeks from mid-September to mid-November. On any given October day in 2015, we can guess that 1.5 million acres of soybeans and 1.4 million acres of corn will be emptied, adding 69 million bushels of soybeans to the nation's supply and 243 million bushels of corn to our bins.
In a previous age, let's say in 1930, corn harvest would have taken just as long, but it would have occupied many more people (and still some animals), and it would have yielded only about 31 million bushels per day or 1.8 billion bushels over the course of the season.
Within the past century, therefore, American mules and oxen have fallen victim to technological unemployment, and the industry's production and efficiency has only flourished. Will the human person sitting in a cab pushing buttons on a screen suffer a similar fate?
I picked the year 1930 for the example because that is year when economist John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay called "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," in which he predicted humanity's "economic problem, the struggle for subsistence" would be solved within a hundred years. So, to follow along with Keynes' thought experiment, assume that 100 years after he wrote the essay, technological innovation becomes so profound and so widespread that we as a species can leave all the real work to be done by machines. Our wealth will have been gathered and distributed in such a way that we can all afford to feed, clothe, and shelter ourselves. In that imaginary year 2030, Keynes predicted:
"For the first time since his creation, man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem -- how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well ... It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society."
Whatever you may think of Keynes and his interventionist economics, this is a famous essay, which shows that our previous generations were thinking about us with as much wonder as we focus on them and their hard work. It also demonstrates that it's within the purview of an economist to abandon math for a bit and instead indulge in a bit of futuristic philosophy.
To me, its most interesting bits are the sentences that address agriculture. I really have a hard time picturing the day when robot combines will self-deploy across thousands of acres to pick corn at exactly the right moisture level, with drone grain carts and hopper trucks trailing obediently behind. And I seriously doubt robots will ever be very effective at working cattle or calving out heifers.
But Keynes pointed out that the pace of technological innovation was basically zero from prehistoric times up to about A.D. 1700. "Almost everything which really matters and which the world possessed at the commencement of the modern age was already known to man at the dawn of history. Language, fire, the same domestic animals which we have today, wheat, barley, the vine and the olive, the plough, the wheel ... There is no record of when we first possessed these things." In comparison, the changes since the Industrial Revolution have been astonishingly quick.
In 1930 Keynes wrote: "There is evidence that the revolutionary technical changes, which have so far chiefly affected industry, may soon be attacking agriculture. We may be on the eve of improvements in the efficiency of food production as great as those which have already taken place in mining, manufacture, and transport. In quite a few years -- in our own lifetimes I mean -- we may be able to perform all the operations of agriculture, mining, and manufacturing with a quarter of the human effort to which we have been accustomed."
His lifetime ended in 1946 when he was 63 years old, but he therefore did witness a profound change in society's employment scheme and some of the western world's population migration away from farms and into cities.
But as anyone who is working a 15-hour day in the cab of a combine right now can tell you, even if that person's siblings and extended relatives are now relaxing somewhere in a suburb, the ones who are left behind to do that remaining "quarter of the human effort" haven't fully given over to the robots yet, and don't fully have the endless leisure that Keynes was so worried about.
Keynes had no children, but his nephews were born around 1920. Depending on what generation is reading this column, you might be among the "grandchildren" he was addressing in his essay's title, or perhaps the great-grandchildren. However much physical labor, mechanized labor, computerized labor, or leisure you yourself anticipate in the year 2030, here's a final prediction from Keynes:
"We shall honor those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin."
Elaine Kub is the author of "Mastering the Grain Markets: How Profits Are Really Made" and can be reached at elaine@masteringthegrainmarkets.com or on Twitter @elainekub.
(SK/BAS/CZ)
© Copyright 2015 DTN/The Progressive Farmer. All rights reserved.
The Future... Not what many would expect... truly the creative nature of humanity supports this:
Genesis 11:6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.
We have one language. The Internet. All Humanity can now communicate... with each other... the creative ability being beyond the imagination of rational people just one generation ago. A new age.
A little Diesel fuel... some steel... and imagination=
Satellite guided robotic controlled.. grain carts... google cars... then trucks... then...
Kub's Den
Elaine Kub
DTN Contributing Analyst
Wed Sep 30, 2015 08:14 AM CDT
What will farmers do to fill their October days once the robots take over? One hundred years after the first Farmall tractor was shipped to your farm, crops are now being harvested with equipment of such size, speed, and efficiency it would have been inconceivable to your grandfather.
Working the farm has seen a lot of changes over the millennia, and especially in the past 400 years, but farming is not yet to the point where humans are not needed. (Illustration courtesy Library of Congress)
This week's Crop Progress report from USDA showed that, given the mostly favorable weather, farmers were going after soybeans relatively faster than corn (21% of soybeans harvested by Sunday evening, compared to 18% of the nation's corn fields). The reaping of the Corn Belt's row crops is a process that typically spreads out across eight weeks from mid-September to mid-November. On any given October day in 2015, we can guess that 1.5 million acres of soybeans and 1.4 million acres of corn will be emptied, adding 69 million bushels of soybeans to the nation's supply and 243 million bushels of corn to our bins.
In a previous age, let's say in 1930, corn harvest would have taken just as long, but it would have occupied many more people (and still some animals), and it would have yielded only about 31 million bushels per day or 1.8 billion bushels over the course of the season.
Within the past century, therefore, American mules and oxen have fallen victim to technological unemployment, and the industry's production and efficiency has only flourished. Will the human person sitting in a cab pushing buttons on a screen suffer a similar fate?
I picked the year 1930 for the example because that is year when economist John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay called "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," in which he predicted humanity's "economic problem, the struggle for subsistence" would be solved within a hundred years. So, to follow along with Keynes' thought experiment, assume that 100 years after he wrote the essay, technological innovation becomes so profound and so widespread that we as a species can leave all the real work to be done by machines. Our wealth will have been gathered and distributed in such a way that we can all afford to feed, clothe, and shelter ourselves. In that imaginary year 2030, Keynes predicted:
"For the first time since his creation, man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem -- how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well ... It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society."
Whatever you may think of Keynes and his interventionist economics, this is a famous essay, which shows that our previous generations were thinking about us with as much wonder as we focus on them and their hard work. It also demonstrates that it's within the purview of an economist to abandon math for a bit and instead indulge in a bit of futuristic philosophy.
To me, its most interesting bits are the sentences that address agriculture. I really have a hard time picturing the day when robot combines will self-deploy across thousands of acres to pick corn at exactly the right moisture level, with drone grain carts and hopper trucks trailing obediently behind. And I seriously doubt robots will ever be very effective at working cattle or calving out heifers.
But Keynes pointed out that the pace of technological innovation was basically zero from prehistoric times up to about A.D. 1700. "Almost everything which really matters and which the world possessed at the commencement of the modern age was already known to man at the dawn of history. Language, fire, the same domestic animals which we have today, wheat, barley, the vine and the olive, the plough, the wheel ... There is no record of when we first possessed these things." In comparison, the changes since the Industrial Revolution have been astonishingly quick.
In 1930 Keynes wrote: "There is evidence that the revolutionary technical changes, which have so far chiefly affected industry, may soon be attacking agriculture. We may be on the eve of improvements in the efficiency of food production as great as those which have already taken place in mining, manufacture, and transport. In quite a few years -- in our own lifetimes I mean -- we may be able to perform all the operations of agriculture, mining, and manufacturing with a quarter of the human effort to which we have been accustomed."
His lifetime ended in 1946 when he was 63 years old, but he therefore did witness a profound change in society's employment scheme and some of the western world's population migration away from farms and into cities.
But as anyone who is working a 15-hour day in the cab of a combine right now can tell you, even if that person's siblings and extended relatives are now relaxing somewhere in a suburb, the ones who are left behind to do that remaining "quarter of the human effort" haven't fully given over to the robots yet, and don't fully have the endless leisure that Keynes was so worried about.
Keynes had no children, but his nephews were born around 1920. Depending on what generation is reading this column, you might be among the "grandchildren" he was addressing in his essay's title, or perhaps the great-grandchildren. However much physical labor, mechanized labor, computerized labor, or leisure you yourself anticipate in the year 2030, here's a final prediction from Keynes:
"We shall honor those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin."
Elaine Kub is the author of "Mastering the Grain Markets: How Profits Are Really Made" and can be reached at elaine@masteringthegrainmarkets.com or on Twitter @elainekub.
(SK/BAS/CZ)
© Copyright 2015 DTN/The Progressive Farmer. All rights reserved.
The Future... Not what many would expect... truly the creative nature of humanity supports this:
Genesis 11:6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.
We have one language. The Internet. All Humanity can now communicate... with each other... the creative ability being beyond the imagination of rational people just one generation ago. A new age.
A little Diesel fuel... some steel... and imagination=
Satellite guided robotic controlled.. grain carts... google cars... then trucks... then...
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