Clues to Our Future: 13 Trends That Could Impact Your Farm

Dive into these 13 trends that could impact your farm.

Clues to Our Future
Clues to Our Future
(Lindsey Pound, Farm Journal)

We remember history as an ongoing story, with plot lines, character development and a logical flow of events. That’s an illusion of hindsight. Life unfolds more like a detective story.

To catch a perp or uncover a masterful scheme requires analyzing clues from the past and present. Our ability to spot or at least assign plausible cause and effects to events looking backward might be helpful, but focusing on the right clues to understand the future is another vital skill altogether.

For example, for the detective drama that is our future, there are useful hints, dead ends and false leads. Consider the clues that follow and get your detective on. Working to unravel this mystery not only prepares your farm for the future, but it is also the challenge of a career.

Click through the trends below.

By now you have likely realized this is a mashup of seemingly unconnected ideas, facts, and guesses, but this is how information arrives every day in our lives.

Unlike a detective drama, the solution will neither be clear nor accomplished in 42 minutes. Visualizing the interaction of disparate pieces of news is hard work many will choose to avoid.

The future will never be as clear as a drawing room identification of the murderer. However, our ability to find connections in a sea of supposedly dissimilar information is advancing with unsettling speed.

The startling findings of artificial intelligence (machine learning) is already guiding decisions from finance to engineering to military strategy by sifting mountains of unrelated data. Agribusinesses have begun deploying AI.

Spoilers: The butler doesn’t do it; there isn’t a rift in the space-time continuum; none of the main actors are a twin/alien/spy.

Read More

7 Big-Picture Trends to Track Now

AgWeb-Logo crop
Related Stories
From dropping phosphorus to switching from corn acres to soybeans, growers are navigating a difficult “recipe for success” as fertilizer prices remain high and grain markets soften.
With school out and more youth heading into summer farm work, now is the time to put safety checks in place before kids take on responsibilities on the farm.
Community members have rallied around Aledo, Ill., demonstrating that rural towns can thrive by blending historic tradition and charm with modern economic tools.
Read Next
USDA and the Trump administration have unveiled a long-term fertilizer strategy focused on boosting U.S. production, fast-tracking projects and lowering costs.
Get News Daily
Get Market Alerts
Get News & Markets App