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We need a new word for these high tech massive farming operations. I come from the Canadian farming sector. Most of the farmers here are individuals, or medium

We need a new word for these high tech massive farming operations. I come from the Canadian farming sector. Most of the farmers here are individuals, or medium sized family operations. Even the big farms aren't "high tech". There just a lot of guys and a bunch of leased machines. We have essentially 0 "high tech" farms. I wouldn't say "modern farms are very high tech operations", I'd say "high tech industrial players are in the process of taking over western agriculture". The word "farm" mean something special to me, as I was born and raised on one. What your talking about is something completely different.

ABeeSea 6y ago
So said the blacksmith’s son watching the invention of the steel press. “High tech industrial players are in the process of taking over western forgery.”
- nightowl_games 6y ago
  Ya and we don't call a factory a Blacksmith now do we? "Modern blacksmiths sure are big!"
  - ABeeSea 6y ago
    Blacksmith was a job. Forge was the location. And industrial forges are very, very large. Blacksmith:Farmer::Forge:Farm
    - hinkley 6y ago
      Foundries were a thing, but even those are giving way to factories, right? I mean, someone will always make stock, but fewer companies melt metal these days, or at the very least relative to those that carve it up or weld it together (which may or may not involve a little melting, given spin welding and other techniques).
      - ABeeSea 6y ago
        Foundries and forges are different things. A forge is closer to what you would call a manufacturing factory: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forging https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forging A foundry smelts. But it is also technically a factory for input material. In the same way a sawmill is a factory. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundry
        InitialLastName 6y ago
        Yeah, "factory" is really the general term for a facility that adds value to inputs at an industrialized scale. A lay person would call everything from a smelting plant to an electronics assembly floor a "factory" and not be wrong. From a pre-industrial blacksmith's perspective, the bigger distinction might be between a "factory" and a "shop". The processes involved are effectively the same; the difference is the scale/flexibility tradeoff (a shop can make different things every day without added overhead, where a "factory" gains enormous efficiency by being configured to do a single process).
- yurielt 6y ago
  Should I remember you that the industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for humanity do you really want to have the farm equivalent of Rockefellers and Ford's ?
- TheTester 6y ago
  The industrial revolution and its consequences...
frosted-flakes 6y ago
Factory farm.
MAGZine 6y ago
I'm curious to know what your standards for high tech are. I know that there are many farms in southern alberta who regularly get the latest farming equipment which includes john deere's that drive themselves. Hell, Lethbridge is home to at least one successful agtech biz, if not more. They're flying drones to analyze weed cover and optimize spraying based on positional data. It can be very high tech. I don't know what you're saying that it doesn't exist. It's happening in canada literally right now. That said a lot of these are for medium to large operations. Despite high tech, farmers who farm smaller plots generally have better yield. The automation has basically just let business expand into larger operations they might not otherwise have manpower or expertise to cover.
- commentingbadly 6y ago
  > There just a lot of guys and a bunch of leased machines. We have essentially 0 "high tech" farms. I think OP might mean that these "high tech farms" are less like farms and more like movie studios. The tractor makers and the bank are acting like a movie studio. The are running a production in a certain area, with certain high tech equipment, with certain subleases on land for a certain number of years. There is no one driving vision and keeping the flame of what high tech should be. It's more like, "let's get this soy to market in the new way that is 7% cheaper before the other team does." Just a guess on what OP means
universa1 6y ago
hmm... having grown up on a farm in Germany and even though my father was only employed as the manager, it still felt more like "our" farm. It was definately a big farm compared to the german average, but then that average also includes a lot of part-time/side-business farms, where. Despite the size, the general methods between a smaller and a larger farm are not that different imho. But the amount of tech in a modern tractor was and still is amazing, and at the time the average car was definately not up to par. "automatic" GPS assisted driving, "laser" assisted driving (on harvesters). Beyond that, most of the "management" data was already digital 15 years ago, partly due to compliance requirements. And satellite imagery, soil samples, etc... were at least partly integrated. And I would still call this a farm! Times change, and clinging to the old times in some nostalgia doesn't help. (I don't want to imply that you do!) And on a slightly different perspective: I don't think bigger farms necessarily produce worse food, generate more externalities, etc... The processes are much more optimized, and at least I think the potential for better food with less externalities is with bigger farms. Also it is a somewhat bogus comparison: Mostly nobody complains that their car / laptop / smartphone comes from a factory, but for farming there is this strange preference for something of 50-100years past.
- GuB-42 6y ago
  > Also it is a somewhat bogus comparison: Mostly nobody complains that their car / laptop / smartphone comes from a factory, but for farming there is this strange preference for something of 50-100years past. It is not specific to farming. Handmade, artisan stuff sells well, even when it is objectively worse. And in general, people are more sympathetic to small businesses than big, faceless corporations. We value the human element I guess. As for food, we tend to equate big farms with everything bad with current agriculture, even if it doesn't have to do with it: crops bred for yield instead of taste/nutrition, monoculture with pesticides/herbicides, ... It is partly true because small, traditional farms then to focus on quality and ethics/sustainability/... rather than price, because they can't compete on price.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    Who's we? I know a guy who can't go through a drive through without lecturing everyone in the car about how being able to get 400kcal for a buck and a half is an amazing feat of societal progress. But he's old and emigrated from Poland so... My example may be an outlier but there's plenty of people who are happy to get Chilean produce in January and don't care how much methane their 75/25 beef emitted. HN has the spare cash and brain cycles to care about a lot of things that normal people don't even think about.
anonymfus 6y ago
I like the idea of SMBC author Zach Weinersmith to repurpose a word "villain" for them IIRC what he wrote on his twitter correctly.
newsclues 6y ago
Southern Ontario has farm tiling fields with high tech gps tractors. Lots of tech for data and tracking
alricb 6y ago
Sovkhoz? That's what they called them in the soviet union.
cronix 6y ago
> What your talking about is something completely different. I wonder if farmers felt the same way when tractors first started coming onto the scene replacing ox/horses and a plow, or combines, or grain carts, or seed drills, or... Did you grow up using any of that at-the-time "high tech" equipment? It was high tech at some point, now just common tech. At what point is something considered "high tech?" If you were born in the age of cell phones, are they considered high tech, or just common tech you can find on any street corner like gumball machines? If you were born in the 1950's, does your opinion differ on cell phones from someone currently in their 20's who grew up with it and knew no other way? Technology fueled the Agricultural Revolution. https://www.thoughtco.com/agricultural-revolution-1991931 https://www.thoughtco.com/agricultural-revolution-1991931
- hellbannedguy 6y ago
  If a John Deere salesman knocked on that screen door 80 years ago and said, "Mr. Farmer I have something that will make your life easier. The only drawback is when it breaks down, you can't buy parts, can't see repair documatation, and only pricy factory workers whom live far away will be able to repair the machine at set rates. The farmer would have slammed the door, and fed his horses.
  - cto_of_antifa 6y ago
    To be fair, if you made the pitch that way to farmer today they would as well - those points are all iffy. mostly, though, the nature of labor has completely and utterly changed in 80 years and comparing the two is like apples and oranges.
    - cat199 6y ago
      > those points are all iffy. for tractors generally, maybe, but have read many things specifically about john deere being very DRM/anti repair, and a quick google seems to highlight that there are court battles being fought over exactly this right now. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-05/farmers-fight-john-deere-over-who-gets-to-fix-an-800-000-tractor https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-05/farmers-f...
snarf21 6y ago
For perspective, my parents both grew up on farms and I spent my summers on them. You are right but "farming" used to be a family with 3 acres and an ox and a plow. These small farms you lament are just as much a whole new world to the ox and plow as a 16/20 row combine that can process 150 acres a day is to your childhood. Efficiency comes from specialization which creates incentives for economies of scale. Software will continue to eat the world.

ABeeSea 6y ago

So said the blacksmith’s son watching the invention of the steel press. “High tech industrial players are in the process of taking over western forgery.”

nightowl_games 6y ago
Ya and we don't call a factory a Blacksmith now do we? "Modern blacksmiths sure are big!"
- ABeeSea 6y ago
  Blacksmith was a job. Forge was the location. And industrial forges are very, very large. Blacksmith:Farmer::Forge:Farm
  - hinkley 6y ago
    Foundries were a thing, but even those are giving way to factories, right? I mean, someone will always make stock, but fewer companies melt metal these days, or at the very least relative to those that carve it up or weld it together (which may or may not involve a little melting, given spin welding and other techniques).
    - ABeeSea 6y ago
      Foundries and forges are different things. A forge is closer to what you would call a manufacturing factory: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forging https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forging A foundry smelts. But it is also technically a factory for input material. In the same way a sawmill is a factory. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundry
      - InitialLastName 6y ago
        Yeah, "factory" is really the general term for a facility that adds value to inputs at an industrialized scale. A lay person would call everything from a smelting plant to an electronics assembly floor a "factory" and not be wrong. From a pre-industrial blacksmith's perspective, the bigger distinction might be between a "factory" and a "shop". The processes involved are effectively the same; the difference is the scale/flexibility tradeoff (a shop can make different things every day without added overhead, where a "factory" gains enormous efficiency by being configured to do a single process).
yurielt 6y ago
Should I remember you that the industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for humanity do you really want to have the farm equivalent of Rockefellers and Ford's ?
TheTester 6y ago
The industrial revolution and its consequences...

frosted-flakes 6y ago

Factory farm.

MAGZine 6y ago

I'm curious to know what your standards for high tech are. I know that there are many farms in southern alberta who regularly get the latest farming equipment which includes john deere's that drive themselves. Hell, Lethbridge is home to at least one successful agtech biz, if not more. They're flying drones to analyze weed cover and optimize spraying based on positional data. It can be very high tech. I don't know what you're saying that it doesn't exist. It's happening in canada literally right now. That said a lot of these are for medium to large operations. Despite high tech, farmers who farm smaller plots generally have better yield. The automation has basically just let business expand into larger operations they might not otherwise have manpower or expertise to cover.

commentingbadly 6y ago
> There just a lot of guys and a bunch of leased machines. We have essentially 0 "high tech" farms. I think OP might mean that these "high tech farms" are less like farms and more like movie studios. The tractor makers and the bank are acting like a movie studio. The are running a production in a certain area, with certain high tech equipment, with certain subleases on land for a certain number of years. There is no one driving vision and keeping the flame of what high tech should be. It's more like, "let's get this soy to market in the new way that is 7% cheaper before the other team does." Just a guess on what OP means

universa1 6y ago

hmm... having grown up on a farm in Germany and even though my father was only employed as the manager, it still felt more like "our" farm. It was definately a big farm compared to the german average, but then that average also includes a lot of part-time/side-business farms, where. Despite the size, the general methods between a smaller and a larger farm are not that different imho. But the amount of tech in a modern tractor was and still is amazing, and at the time the average car was definately not up to par. "automatic" GPS assisted driving, "laser" assisted driving (on harvesters). Beyond that, most of the "management" data was already digital 15 years ago, partly due to compliance requirements. And satellite imagery, soil samples, etc... were at least partly integrated. And I would still call this a farm! Times change, and clinging to the old times in some nostalgia doesn't help. (I don't want to imply that you do!) And on a slightly different perspective: I don't think bigger farms necessarily produce worse food, generate more externalities, etc... The processes are much more optimized, and at least I think the potential for better food with less externalities is with bigger farms. Also it is a somewhat bogus comparison: Mostly nobody complains that their car / laptop / smartphone comes from a factory, but for farming there is this strange preference for something of 50-100years past.

GuB-42 6y ago
> Also it is a somewhat bogus comparison: Mostly nobody complains that their car / laptop / smartphone comes from a factory, but for farming there is this strange preference for something of 50-100years past. It is not specific to farming. Handmade, artisan stuff sells well, even when it is objectively worse. And in general, people are more sympathetic to small businesses than big, faceless corporations. We value the human element I guess. As for food, we tend to equate big farms with everything bad with current agriculture, even if it doesn't have to do with it: crops bred for yield instead of taste/nutrition, monoculture with pesticides/herbicides, ... It is partly true because small, traditional farms then to focus on quality and ethics/sustainability/... rather than price, because they can't compete on price.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  Who's we? I know a guy who can't go through a drive through without lecturing everyone in the car about how being able to get 400kcal for a buck and a half is an amazing feat of societal progress. But he's old and emigrated from Poland so... My example may be an outlier but there's plenty of people who are happy to get Chilean produce in January and don't care how much methane their 75/25 beef emitted. HN has the spare cash and brain cycles to care about a lot of things that normal people don't even think about.

anonymfus 6y ago

I like the idea of SMBC author Zach Weinersmith to repurpose a word "villain" for them IIRC what he wrote on his twitter correctly.

newsclues 6y ago

Southern Ontario has farm tiling fields with high tech gps tractors. Lots of tech for data and tracking

alricb 6y ago

Sovkhoz? That's what they called them in the soviet union.

cronix 6y ago

> What your talking about is something completely different. I wonder if farmers felt the same way when tractors first started coming onto the scene replacing ox/horses and a plow, or combines, or grain carts, or seed drills, or... Did you grow up using any of that at-the-time "high tech" equipment? It was high tech at some point, now just common tech. At what point is something considered "high tech?" If you were born in the age of cell phones, are they considered high tech, or just common tech you can find on any street corner like gumball machines? If you were born in the 1950's, does your opinion differ on cell phones from someone currently in their 20's who grew up with it and knew no other way? Technology fueled the Agricultural Revolution. https://www.thoughtco.com/agricultural-revolution-1991931 https://www.thoughtco.com/agricultural-revolution-1991931

hellbannedguy 6y ago
If a John Deere salesman knocked on that screen door 80 years ago and said, "Mr. Farmer I have something that will make your life easier. The only drawback is when it breaks down, you can't buy parts, can't see repair documatation, and only pricy factory workers whom live far away will be able to repair the machine at set rates. The farmer would have slammed the door, and fed his horses.
- cto_of_antifa 6y ago
  To be fair, if you made the pitch that way to farmer today they would as well - those points are all iffy. mostly, though, the nature of labor has completely and utterly changed in 80 years and comparing the two is like apples and oranges.
  - cat199 6y ago
    > those points are all iffy. for tractors generally, maybe, but have read many things specifically about john deere being very DRM/anti repair, and a quick google seems to highlight that there are court battles being fought over exactly this right now. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-05/farmers-fight-john-deere-over-who-gets-to-fix-an-800-000-tractor https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-05/farmers-f...

snarf21 6y ago

For perspective, my parents both grew up on farms and I spent my summers on them. You are right but "farming" used to be a family with 3 acres and an ox and a plow. These small farms you lament are just as much a whole new world to the ox and plow as a 16/20 row combine that can process 150 acres a day is to your childhood. Efficiency comes from specialization which creates incentives for economies of scale. Software will continue to eat the world.