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For better or worse, the spread of digitized agriculture is changing the very nature of what it means to be a farmer. Henry Fincher, Hunter’s dad, is 58 and has been farming since he was a kid. “I picked a lot of cotton by hand, dragging it in a sack,” he says, standing in his spotless cowboy boots and blue jeans in a bare dirt field adjoining the one I watched his son plant. Back then, in between planting and harvesting seasons, “we’d hunt all winter, and fish and swim all summer,” he says. “Now, when you’re not in the field, you’re on the computer.” The Finchers have 134 fields split into multiple planting zones, and the data for each needs constant updating. The family also has to track everything from the weather to stockpiled grain inventories in the overseas markets they sell into. All of which is just fine with Johnny Verell. “I don’t wanna be out in the sun rebuilding a tractor engine,” he says. “I’d rather be on the computer side.”

Over the past century, mechanization has shrunk the proportion of Americans working in agriculture from 41 percent to less than two percent. In coming years, families like the Finchers may continue to make their living from the land, but their jobs won’t involve much interaction with the actual dirt. John Deere and other companies are prototyping machines that won’t need any driver at all. It won’t be long before you can control a tractor via a laptop in your living room, just as today’s air-force pilots fly drones over Afghanistan from an air-conditioned control station in Nevada. American agriculture may soon be just one more business run from a cubicle farm.

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– http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/field-datastream-65371/