Robert Corban is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of History at Columbia University and a Barksdale Fellow in the McDonnell Barksdale Honors College at the University of Mississippi.
“Heeding lessons from farmers who persist in place, we can embrace these virtues. Rather than give up or get out, we can dig in. Rather than go big, we can go home."
All of the biases, all of the bloodlessness, and all the banalities of Tractor Wars, I suggest, are the products of a whole way of thinking about technology, agriculture and the economy, one that values invention over implementation or use, innovation over maintenance or care, and the “modern” over the technologies that are proven to work better for the plants, animals and people of the broader communities of agriculture in the present as well as the past.
For readers in North America, familiar as most of us are with the history our own agrarian tradition as well as our own “seismic shift in agriculture” from the work of Berry, there emerges much from the work of Hawking as well as Bell of which we should be reminded.
