Our modern era has been described variously as post-industrial and post-modern (whatever that means). It seems to me that we are now entering a post-biological world, or perhaps a post-natural world or maybe a post-experiential world, certainly a post-agrarian world. We live in a time where children no longer play outside, where people, even in restaurants, look at their smartphones instead of each other. And when they do communicate it is through the untested medium of a digital screen.

Farming is an art, it is also a craft. We think about it frequently as a systemic treatment of nature and with nature, the goal of which is the production of food and fiber. All of this when lumped and worked together comes of the very origins of the word “technology.” Not the ways we see it and hear of it today. In the 1970’s we came upon the first common usage of the term “high technology” as applied to computers and applied data-driven systems and then morphing into artificial intelligence. Today the ‘high’ has been dropped. Now, frequently, when people throw around the word technology they see it in terms of IT or Intelligence Technology. But for farmers and farming, Hi-tech spreads out to include driverless tractors, drones, and the marriage of mutated plant and animal forms to chemical intensities.