I apologize for not keeping up with my usual pace of blog posts.  I have been working on my book and distracted by the photovoltaic’s (solar energy) project that I discussed in a previous post below.  Here are a few more paragraphs from the future farmer book I am working on.  This part is from a section that discusses future farm technologies that you might encounter, implement, or take advantage of on your farm. 
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Times have greatly changed in farming since the days when our earliest ancestors wielded sickles made of flint and bone to harvest their tiny plots of primitive wheat – and yet, it is likely that there are changes yet to come in farming far greater than anything that has transpired in the last ten thousand years. To date, most technological changes in farming have been qualitative changes – we do things more intensively, more efficiently, with better tools and techniques. Despite those innovations, the basic elements of farming are still identifiable despite millennia of achievement and development. Our friend the Neolithic farmer wouldn’t understand the chemistry of advanced fertilizers – but he knew that fertilization improved the yield. He would run in terror from a combine, but the diversity and flexibility of his primitive toolset indicate that he understood the use of different tools for different stages in growing and harvesting a crop.

In the short term, we are likely to see a continuation of existing trends – farmers in 2015 will still use tractors, will still plant seeds in soil, will still take samples of their soil and worry about soil conservation and quality. The details will change – it may be a robot taking the soil sample, rather than a farmer with an augur – but in many ways future farming is going to look a lot like farming today.

In other areas, however, farming is likely to undergo a radical revision of the underlying assumptions that agronomists have held for decades and even centuries. Our Neolithic farmer might have had an inkling of the idea that a plant can get stronger or yield a better crop, but would have little idea of the mechanism and would rely on trial and error; the idea of genetic engineering would be completely incomprehensible to him. Our grandfathers certainly understood the idea of hybridizing crops and breeding new stock for desired characteristics like frost resistance or drought tolerance –they were pretty smart guys - but the idea of genetically engineering crops to add desired traits at the molecular level, directly editing the building blocks of plant life, would have blown their minds – and the notion that one day we’d be genetically tailoring crops to match the exact climactic and soil profile of a particular area, even a particular farm, would have seemed shear madness.

Farmers have long had to put up with the popular stereotype of the farmer as a semi-skilled tiller of the soil, inarticulate and uneducated. There was never much truth to the stereotype – even our Neolithic farmer knew an awful lot about the world – but in recent decades, farming has required both practical and theoretical understanding of chemistry, meteorology, ecology, mechanics, plant biology, and at least a half-dozen other disciplines. The stereotype is in for a few more body blows in coming decades, as farming becomes a job that combines computer programming, ecological management, genetics, nanotech engineering, and many other technical fields. Let’s take a look at some of the scientific advances likely to (further) revolutionize farming in your professional lifetime. ……………..lots more forth coming in the next generation farmer book.