Actually even small-time farmers today are more sophisticated than you might think. At my last software job, at a relatively small agro company, I learned that any piece of farm equipment newer than 25 or 30 years has a controller that can run it - say like varying the amount of water, fertilizer, pesticide etc that gets applied to basically every square meter of a field. They take samples and develop computer maps showing the levels of moisture, nitrogen, phosphorous, etc. Then software creates programs for the equipment, to tailor what happens at every spot. I was surprised by how technical modern farming is. A lot of the equipment drives itself around, there’s just a human sitting in the cab in case something goes wrong. But of course all this tech increases their costs and they still struggle to make a profit.
As long as that sophistication is geared towards reaching capitalist targets, all it does is enable them to ruin the land through “tragedies of the commons” faster.
Whether that’s desertification because you’re pumping up more groundwater than rain can replenish, nitrates continuing to exist after they leave your land, pesticides giving your customers cancer, insecticides causing a collapse of pollinator populations you rely on for crop yields, crop pandemics due to a lack of genetic diversity, or something else, modern capitalist farmers have a lot of fancy tools for destroying the planet and leaving society vulnerable to starvation.
Actually even small-time farmers today are more sophisticated than you might think. At my last software job, at a relatively small agro company, I learned that any piece of farm equipment newer than 25 or 30 years has a controller that can run it - say like varying the amount of water, fertilizer, pesticide etc that gets applied to basically every square meter of a field. They take samples and develop computer maps showing the levels of moisture, nitrogen, phosphorous, etc. Then software creates programs for the equipment, to tailor what happens at every spot. I was surprised by how technical modern farming is. A lot of the equipment drives itself around, there’s just a human sitting in the cab in case something goes wrong. But of course all this tech increases their costs and they still struggle to make a profit.
As long as that sophistication is geared towards reaching capitalist targets, all it does is enable them to ruin the land through “tragedies of the commons” faster.
Whether that’s desertification because you’re pumping up more groundwater than rain can replenish, nitrates continuing to exist after they leave your land, pesticides giving your customers cancer, insecticides causing a collapse of pollinator populations you rely on for crop yields, crop pandemics due to a lack of genetic diversity, or something else, modern capitalist farmers have a lot of fancy tools for destroying the planet and leaving society vulnerable to starvation.