Farmers across the West are socioeconomically not in a good place right now. Many are leaving the profession, which used to be a vocation, due to big payoffs by the EU and other such wealthy bloated Net-Zero globalists encouraging them to sell the land. There is also the allure of AI and Hi-Tech machinery, which I’ll come to later.
I used to work as an agricultural correspondent and editor of a farming magazine some 20 years ago and things were financially bad back then for farmers throughout the West but things are now a lot worse.
The war on farming in the past was less obvious, but it goes back a long time to late-1950s/early ’60s, when new expensive machinery led to bigger intense farming and less farm employees, amongst other labour-led factors.
With AI technologies, some farms are already hosting robotic ‘workers’ toiling away on the land, from dusk to dawn. These tend to the livestock’s needs, but there are also plans to have them watch over crops, while other agri-robots hoe weeds and spray pests.
Experts claim that self-guiding machines will soon revolutionize farming and perhaps redraw some of our landscapes. And there is the danger that future generations of large farming animals will become unfamiliar with human contact and will become aggressive/territorial when approached by a person, especially cattle.
Speaking of cattle: In 2023, Irish farmers were pressured to cull up to 200,000 cows to meet climate goals. Most farmers did not go along with this, as dairy farmers, whose herds allegedly produce much of Ireland’s emissions, said large-scale culling was not the answer.
As an aside, and regarding the produce farmers sell, there has been a major decline of Irish butchers. Almost 600 sole-trader butchers have closed in the past 20 years, with about 550 remaining, as the trade loses out to the rise of convenience stores and changing consumer habits. The rise of veganism is also a negative factor regarding agriculture, not to mention the Green goons’ constant attacks on farming and embracing carbon net-zero, which is a financial disaster.
In England, the main political parties were recently up in arms regarding a row about farming finances. During the recent Budget, Labour’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, was slammed for “destroying the family farm” by imposing inheritance tax on agricultural land.
According to The Daily Mail, TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp accused Chancellor Rachel Reeves of leaving all farmers “f****d”, following her inheritance tax raid during an explosive broadside online.
Reeves dropped a £40bn tax bomb, and was accused of destroying the traditional family farm. Ms Allsopp said: “Rachel Reeves had f****d all farmers, she has destroyed their ability to pass farms on to their children, and broken the future of all our great estates, it is an appalling decision which shows the government has ZERO understanding of the what matters to rural voters.”
The result is that all farms worth more than £1 million (this includes expensive equipment), the ‘death tax’ will apply with a 50% relief at an effective rate of 20% from April 2026.
Some members of opposition parties said the Budget would “single-handedly kill the family farm”. The UK Spectator reported some constituents warned they would “have to now consider selling up”. A popular TV star called Jeremy Clarkson, who owns a 1,000-acre farm in Oxfordshire, posted on X that farmers had been “shafted” by Labour’s inheritance tax hike.
Eva Vlaardingerbroek is a Dutch common-sense politician and farmers’ activist. She said there is a global war on farming going on under the guise of ‘saving’ our greatest global good: the planet. She added that our policymakers all have very different solutions to the so called ‘global emergency’, depending on their respective countries. Because as it turns out, “English cows are wildly different from Dutch cows – and apparently, in some cases, borders do matter. When it comes to farming, the Dutch government has decided nitrogen is the devil that plagues the Netherlands, but the UK government is fighting a war against its own Beelzebub which takes shape in the form of methane.
“In a recently published policy paper called Powering Up Britain – ‘The Net Zero Growth Plan’, the UK government announced that it has a plan to tackle the cows’ seemingly deadly burps and farts, stating it anticipates the entry of ‘high efficacy methane suppressing products to the UK market from 2025 and will explore the role of industry and government to maximize uptake of such products for suitable cattle farm systems at pace, through a phased approach.
Speaking on BBC Radio 5 Live recently, a potato farmer called Mark said he was left fearing for his livelihood. He told host Nicky Campbell: “It was a sleepless night last night. I started farming 27 years ago… and I have no idea where to go now.
I’m a third-generation farmer. My next-door neighbour calls us a window-box farmer; we’re just under 500 acres… I’ve worked out I will have £2 million to pay. I have no idea what I’ve got to do other than it will be sold and I will be the last generation which will farm it, which will be a sad state of affairs.
As for America, farm debt is at an all-time high and thousands of farmers have given up farming. In 2019, Time magazine wrote:
Suicides in farm communities are happening with alarming frequency. Farmers aren’t the only workers in the American economy being displaced by technology, but when they lose their jobs, they are also ejected from their homes and the land that’s been in their family for generations.
Some of the agri-AI pros and cons include (pros): A More accurate use of water, fertilizers, and pesticides, reducing waste and improving sustainability; better crop monitoring by drones, sensors that can detect pest infestations, thus intervene in targeting such problems.
AI models can forecast weather, yields, and market prices, thus enabling farmers to plan planting, harvesting, etc. Also, in the field of irrigation, AI systems can detect soil moisture ensuring the health of crops.
But in terms of the cons: Small farmers would suffer from the high costs of AI/hi-tech hardware and machinery, despite the laying off of many farm-hand workers. And the few workers who would remain on farms, would need training on such devices in rural areas that lacked stable internet wi-fi outlets.
Farming is no longer about getting one’s hands dirty anymore. It’s about data. Every time a farmer uses a smart device, be it a drone, soil sensor, or GPS-guided tractor, it’s collecting lots of information: Crop health, weather patterns, soil chemistry, even the movements and habits of the farmer as he or she works the land, ‘Big Brother’ is paying close attention on your whereabouts.
But who owns this data? If it’s not the farmer, it has to be the big tech companies, which collect it, analyze it, and sell it to marketers, insurers, food suppliers, and lots of other businesses lurking in the shadows. In a nutshell, a small farmer’s data is mined, as big corporations inherit the financial gains and become more in control.
Artificial intelligence in agriculture is not wholly new. According to a BBC report last year by Sam Becker:
Nascent iterations have been in use for two decades, like auto-steering guidance systems to row crops such as corn. But AI take-up in the past few years has been swift; according to some estimates, 87% of businesses in the US agricultural industry were using AI in some shape or form as of late 2021. The federal government, too, is currently fast-tracking the agriculture industry towards the tech, providing financial incentives to speed up development and deployment of AI across the country.
We’ve come a long way in this “Brave New World” from those Halcyon laidback hazy days of summer, hilariously depicted in the wonderful 1965 American Absurdist sitcom TV classic, Green Acres. For younger readers unfamiliar with this comedy, it was about a wealthy New York City attorney, fulfilling his dream to become a farmer, with his pretty, high-maintenance wife, uprooted against her will from her Manhattan luxury apartment to a run-down farm in a place called Hooterville. In Green Acres, the townsfolk fellow farmers, store owners, and other workers were likeable goofy bumpkins.
Meanwhile, fast-forward to 2026: With the average age of farmers in 2026 being 60-plus, compared to mid-40s/50 back in the 1960s, the sun-up-to-sundown manual labor needed to effectively run a farm is losing its appeal. It seems God’s little acres are under threat, as the big-Tech AI juggernaut combine keeps on rolling.
And with AI aside, if things couldn’t get any worse, there is the war in the Middle East to consider, especially the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz. Even if war ends, restarting production and transport for fertilizers and other such components could take weeks during a time that is essential for planting. About one-third of global seaborne trade in fertilizers passes through the Strait. Living in interesting times is something we could do without these days, especially for farmers.