Farmers are highly entrepreneurial and work very hard, a combine is a welcome invention. It's the hired farm hands who are worried about the combine harvester. It's a very interesting question, what will happen to our society when we have less and less need for manual and rote labour.
The farmer scenario is interesting. On the one hand, (speaking as one who comes from a family of farmers) - they are amazingly early adopters of technology - to a degree that I think might shock your average denzien of HN. DGPS, Real-Time weather reports feeding into Options Plays on their Crops (I learned more about calls, puts, and commodities markets in one evening around a campfire in banff, than 2 years of economics classes and endless surfing of thestreet.com ever taught me), chemical systems for fertilizers, satellite displays on the hydration levels of their fields - these are all fairly common tools of your farmer that has more than four or five sections.
But what they lack is capital, scale, vertical integration, and access to enterprise IT systems.
The first casualties of technological advances were the manual laborers, but, as technology advances, and automation evolves further, the "independent farmer" will cease to exist in North America outside of the smaller retirement/sustenance farms (that are numerous, but don't contribute that greatly to the food supply) and niche areas that supply "Organically Grown", "Locally harvested" markets.
The Very Large Farms (that is, those farms doing > $500K sales/year) will continue to grow as a percentage of total farms, and those will increasingly become larger, and, as a result, eliminate farming jobs.
Farmers are stubborn, and resilient, so it won't happen quickly - but as those farms are lost to the mega-agricorps, they won't come back into the family. Average age of a farmer in the United States is around 57 - so, in about 10 years from now, as we see wider deployment of automated vehicles, yet another segment of the american job market will begin its permanent decline.
"As America starts to debate farm subsidies and big ag, while college grads are starting more small farms than any time in the last 100 years, look to the power of technology to break open an unhealthy and highly inefficient food distribution system that has left the world both obese and stuck with higher food prices."
"Corbin Hill is using Farmigo and a CSA model to deliver this healthy and fresh food at prices LOWER than the local Harlem supermarkets."
Farmers are highly entrepreneurial and work very hard, a combine is a welcome invention. It's the hired farm hands who are worried about the combine harvester. It's a very interesting question, what will happen to our society when we have less and less need for manual and rote labour.