MachineryLink

I can't watch a huge combine roaring across a field without thinking that what I'm watching is a factory on wheels. Raw materials go in; a finished product comes out. Same with livestock facilities such as hog houses: A group of animals goes in; meat almost ready for market comes out. Simple enough. Yet "factory farming" on a bumper sticker is a pejorative term. It somehow manages to impart negative images of mindless machines grinding out suspect food for an innocent populous.

Factory farming -- or industrialized agriculture -- was a topic of conversation for a young Mississippi farmer and me as we rode in his pickup on a tour of a land improvement project he is finishing. The project involves shaping the land to reduce variation and create better water flow for flood irrigation for corn and soybeans. The plan is to catch the runoff and reuse it, making efficient use of resources and taking some of the variability out his operation.

The young farmer plans to use the project as a demonstration not only for other farmers but also for the general public. He wants to set up web cams to capture images of the system in operation so that folks can tune in via the Internet to see the environmental and economic benefits large-scale farms like his can achieve.

The fact that he is altering the land to reduce natural variables got us talking about the industrial process, which strives to do the same thing. The young farmer was frustrated that people complain about large-scale, capital-intensive farming, as if that type of farming is somehow not as pure as small-scale farming, and therefore less desirable ... maybe even evil.

It's nice to have a nostalgic image of a friendly farmer in bib overalls carrying bushel baskets of produce into a roadside stand, he said. But can farms like that feed nine billion people?

I related to the young farmer a conversation I'd had a couple years earlier with Dave Everitt, now a retired John Deere global president for agriculture. Everitt, who is an engineer by training, told me that a key idea that makes factories efficient is reducing variability. "We have to do the same thing in the [farm] field," Everitt said. "Mother Nature is a great normal curve. What we want to do is reduce variability with technology, data and the same kind of management tools we use in the factory."

Of course, factories have downsides. If not properly designed, for example, they can be polluters and they can be unsafe environments for workers. Same is true of the farm.

Still, the young farmer and I agreed that the factory model of manufacturing generally has shaped for the better global lifestyles and the global economy. We wondered, for instance: How many people could afford to buy automobiles if they were made by hand in small facilities rather than in enormous, efficient factories? Only the rich could afford such vehicles, leaving the vast majority of folks to fend for themselves with horse and wagon or -- more likely -- shoe leather.

Neither the young farmer nor I thought that large-scale farms will or should obliterate small scale or niche farms. Far from it, there is a growing demand for specialty crops and locally grown foods. That's a good thing, a healthy thing. But consumers should understand that such foods almost inevitably will be more costly than ones produced on an industrial model. Some consumers will always eat well because they can afford to pay for custom-grown animals or crops produced on a small scale. The majority of mankind? Maybe not.

By the end of our conversation, the young farmer and I agreed that perhaps agriculture should stop fighting the "factory farm" label and instead embrace it. Perhaps farmers should strive to explain to the non-farming community that unless it wants a world where only a few eat well, food production will have to increasingly rely on methods that use big machines, reduce variably and function more like a factory.

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