Farmers have a lot of demands to juggle.
They’re expected to be competent with agronomy, machinery mechanics, business management, human resources management, marketing, driving enormous machines and more.
That’s a lot for any businessperson. That’s a lot for any person. Too much, really.
And that’s why it’s wrong to look at farmers as simply business operators attempting to wring the biggest profit possible out of their operations. Farmers won’t always make the most rational choice about how they operate, if that choice will bring added stress and more additional risk than they’re willing to take on and make their lives seem more complicated.
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Decisions that allow farmers to avoid being overwhelmed with things that might only marginally work, or things that might take a lot of effort to use, or may not work at all, may be the most rational choices producers can make.
This is obvious to some of the good agricultural economists working today, but it has sometimes been a challenge for orthodox economists and new technology promoters.
This observation comes from recent papers by economists like those I write about in a story on page one, and in a paper by agricultural economists Alfons Weersink of the University of Guelph in Ontario and Murray Fulton of the University of Saskatchewan.
These researchers note that technology promoters, like those who think most farmers should be using variable rate technology, don’t understand this human reality of the farmer nearly enough.
“The starting point for this examination is the assumption that although farmers will wish to improve their situation, they have limited resources (time, money, information, cognitive capacity) and hence are unable to determine immediately which activities provide relative advantage,” write Weersink and Fulton in the 2020 paper Limits to Profit Maximization as a Guide to Behavior Change, in the journal Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy.
Farmers are open-minded about good ideas and new opportunities, but many won’t jump in with both feet. So, they experiment, or they will watch neighbours and friends who experiment with new technologies and hot ideas.
If something really seems to make sense and makes life better, farmers tend to be keen to embrace it, like auto-steer. That saves the neck and back a lot of wear and tear and can extend a farmer’s working life.
More demanding and challenging technologies like VRT, which either require considerable training or the hiring of outsiders to analyze, are a tougher sell. Lots of farmers have been experimenting with VRT, but that hasn’t always led to happy customers, and that has put off many other farmers.
There’s much reason to believe that VRT is going to be a dominant technology of the future. Done right, it has huge potential.
But farmers face other demands. Sometimes, just keeping going with what works now is all they can do.
When technology promoters look at farmers and when more orthodox economists look at farmers, they need to realize there’s a whole person there, not just an operator.
