Now, you can only do what you can do and being in two places at once is not possible, but the thing I can’t quite process is that the tractor itself wasn’t broken. The drill attached to it wasn’t broken either. The issue was with the autosteer. A decade or so ago, we didn’t have autosteer and we managed perfectly fine. Most tractor drivers can drive in a straight line and the work was done. Do we need autosteer? Do we actually need the technology?
There is no doubt the technology makes life easier and perhaps even makes it better. GPS can drive a tractor straighter line. The drill will then put the seeds in exactly the right place and it will be more efficient. But, if the job needs doing and as is often the case in farming, timing is critical, particularly if you are trying to beat the rain, probably the best thing to do is crack on. Get the job done, and worry about the technology as and when you can. The seeds won’t grow in the bag and if you’re rained off for a week, well, straight line or not, you would have been more efficient getting the seeds in the ground.
We are in danger of surrendering our cognitive abilities to technology and most notably at the moment, to artificial intelligence. Indeed, the Royal Observatory Greenwich has warned against using AI tools to get instant answers and solve complex problems. It might make us less intelligent in the long run.
So, there we are kids. Be careful of how you use technology and how much you use it. I am not a paragon of sensible use of technology that’s for sure, but I don’t have chat GPT on my phone. I haven’t found a need for it yet, although I will say I have used a Google search, the first answer of which is usually AI generated, to give me a seed rate for a mixed species cover crop. It was sort of what I expected, so maybe it was just assisting me, rather than doing the whole task? I’ll let you decide that!
Back in the real world, we have finished calving, bar one cow, who is so round, I can’t believe that she hasn’t calved already. There are a few of the young ewes left to lamb, but otherwise we are all done for this year. Thoughts turn to summer jobs. We have a bit of work to do on our farm water system and quite a lot of fencing to do. Not to mention grass conservation. Silaging and hay making are never far away once we get in June.
I have also been doing some running around the farm, not enough yet, as I’m training for a half marathon, but hopefully I will be ready by early July. I did a duathlon in Ludlow in mid-May, known as ’Storm the Castle’. I only did the short course, but my legs were pretty stiff the day after! The last couple of hills were very hard work. That said, it was good fun and showed me I need to do more training. There is no substitute for getting miles into your legs!
So, having run the spell checker (not AI assisted) and proof read this article, I’m off to look at the cattle and the sheep, walk the dogs and get on with the rest of my day. I will get my dopamine hit from doing something practical like fixing a broken gate and this evening I will read a book before I go to bed. Be careful of the technology, are you using it, or is it using you?
Go well. Rich
rich@risburycourt.com
75
Regenerative Farming
LIVE24-SEVEN.COM
BUSINESS ON THE FARM
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