Arable Matters: Too reliant on technology to cope without it?

But for once it’s not the weather in the form of the devastating effects of major floods, or long-lasting droughts which have been causing problems for the antipodean arable sector. But rather it was the inconvenience of a widespread outage of the GPS signal which everyone – including ourselves – now rely on heavily to carry out everyday tasks.

The outage might have been fairly short-lived, but it hammered home just how reliant the industry has become on the technology, with hundreds of angry calls streaming into dealers in Oz and New Zealand when, for some, the work of drilling next year’s wheat ground to a halt (for who would want to risk missed patches, or wiggly tramlines?)

It was reported that many of the big agricultural companies supplying GPS services were caught up in the caper, including John Deere, Case IH and Trimble – and while there was a workaround for farmers, using a free signal, it was nowhere near as accurate as the satellite service.

Somewhat embarrassingly, though, I understand that it was the British Inmarsat I-4F1 satellite which was the cause of the failure – and in the process was responsible for plunging much of the southern hemisphere and a large chunk of Asia back into the dark ages – or at least as far back as the early 1990s.

However, while it might be easy to have a go at our Ozzie friends and extract the Michael for the fact that they would appear to have lost the ability to steer their tractors in a straight line, the outage really does flag up just how dependant we have become on this and similar types of technology – and not only for giving us the ability to steer in a straight line, whilst also texting our mates and checking e-mails.

Ok, it’s also got to be admitted that it’s probably a damned sight trickier to drive a 15m no-till drilling rig across a parched stubble paddock than it is to keep a 3m single pass unit square on a ploughed field, though.

But there’s no escaping the fact that this technology is now also deeply embedded in everything from our sprayers to our fertiliser spreaders and even in our ability to yield map at harvest time.

It lies at the centre of most of the recent advances in production efficiencies and in the effective gathering and utilisation of quality data – which, as we are constantly being reminded, is crucial to ensuring our productivity rates and sustainability scores improve.

When using a sprayer, being even a few percentage points out can lead to problems with weed kill and disease control if it’s out one way – while it can create the possibility of over dosing to levels which could be above statutory limits if there’s double coverage.

With an increasing emphasis on precision agriculture and variable rate spreading of fertiliser and even seeding rates, there could inevitably be problems here too.

But the whole thing also highlighted the changes we’ve seen in the workforce over recent years. As someone noted, it used to be the oldest, most practised hand who set up the first drills in a tattie field at planting time, drawing on years of experience to keep a line which was straight and true.

Nowadays, though, it’s often the youngest member of the team – a digital native only recently weaned off his X-Box – who sets up the sat guidance and leads the work.

All well and good, but I can’t help but feel that although new technology can go some way towards addressing the shortage of experienced workers, it might not be the best idea in the world to become over-reliant on it and abandon the basic training and skills which have served the industry well for years as a result.

Of course, as we all know, the benefits offered by such technologies are obvious – but at the same time there’s a growing recognition that such innovations can also harbour the threat of hidden risks and costs.

The trend towards built-in obsolescence in high-tech gadgetry is pretty obvious perhaps to anyone who has bought a mobile phone in recent years.

For many manufacturers haven’t been shy to sneak in some software which sees the performance of the product decline over the course of a few years – while also using patent protections and non-serviceable parts to ensure you need to upgrade on a regular basis.

Not only does this practice come with considerable economic expense for those using the things, but it also further fuels the inevitable environmental costs of increased consumption.

The complex nature of the technology can also lead to a monopolisation of the market, leaving buyers no option but to seek any repairs and improvements through the original suppliers rather than taking them to independent operators.

Farming circles haven’t been immune from this trend either. In the US it was only earlier this year that it took the threat of a mass action for ‘right to repair’ legislation to get one major tractor manufacturer to finally release the software, manuals, and other information which is needed to service their equipment to farmers and independent repair shops in order to finally let them diagnose and fix problems without incurring main dealer costs.

As well as market monopolisation, cyber security – or the lack thereof – has also been recognised as another threat to which the industry is more or less wide open, with the scale of the adoption of computer technology seen today leaving the industry wide open to hacking and ransomware attacks.

However, a recent investigation which had been commissioned to look into the threat posed to the UK’s food security by such threats concluded that, as much of our reliance on computer technology is focused on improving efficiency, unlike some other industries the effect on overall production on a national, or global basis wasn’t considered to be too drastic.

But surely that only serves to highlight the importance of making sure that we take steps to ensure that the underlying skills to do the job unaided are still there – and it might be worth remembering that the next time we find ourselves judging how straight the neighbour’s tramlines are …