Many agricultural trend predictions have missed their mark

A lot of sure-fire predictions over the past decade or two have failed to materialize. The ideas and innovations aren’t necessarily dead, but they have certainly fallen far short of expectations.

Remember when plant-based meat substitutes were all the rage?

Companies, including industry leader Beyond Meat, were going to put beef production out of business. Consumers tried plant burgers for awhile. Fast food outlets even dabbled.

In the end, demand fell off, company market values plummeted and market share remained tiny. The movement isn’t dead, but it has faltered.

Then there’s cultured meat, the test tube, petri dish product that was going to replace live animal production. It’s hard to believe this will ever overcome the high cost and the yuck factor, but it received a great deal of media attention for a while.

Vegetarians and vegans are certainly a segment of the consumer market, but the growth has hardly been as exponential as once predicted.

The same is true of organic agriculture.

Organic produce has become increasingly prominent in supermarket aisles, but as an overall percentage of agricultural production, organic has not had the dramatic growth once forecast by market watchers.

Do you recall the hype over 3-D printing? We’d be going to our equipment dealers and rather than stocking parts or ordering them in, they’d just fire up a 3-D printer to create the replacement part we needed.

A decade or more later and 3-D printers are nowhere to be seen. When you hear anything about 3-D printing it’s usually in regard to the illegal production of hand guns.

For many years, futurists have told us that big farm equipment was going to be obsolete. Farming, they said, would be done with swarms of relatively small, remotely controlled units that could operate day and night.

Automation has certainly made great strides. On modern dairy farms, robots both milk and feed the cows.

However, in field crop production, the trend is still to bigger, faster and more sophisticated.

Swarms of small seeders, sprayers and harvesters don’t seem to be on the horizon. Even the remote-controlled aspect of equipment has advanced more slowly than anticipated.

Spraying systems that can identify weeds are progressing, but adoption rates remain low.

Green on brown spray technology has existed for quite some time. Green on green, where the system can identify and spray weeds within a crop, has been in development for years and seems to have potential.

While commercial units exist, the technology is far from commonplace.

Farmer adoption of new technology can be very rapid when the benefits are obvious and the cost isn’t prohibitive.

Over the course of just a handful of years, the majority of prairie grain farmers implemented GPS guidance systems on their seeding, spraying and harvesting equipment. Now, it’s hard to imagine operating without it.

When a new, superior technology is developed, old technology becomes obsolete. Remember disc marker systems for field operations? Perhaps you have some in a scrap iron pile. Until a dozen years ago, foam markers were standard equipment on many sprayers.

One of the biggest prediction misses and one that keeps being repeated in different forms warns of a climate catastrophe just around the corner. Impending doom has now been predicted for decades.

The alarmists have cried wolf so many times that the general public has become desensitized.

It’s difficult to maintain a focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions with the world facing ongoing wars, food insecurity, homelessness and addictions.

Kevin Hursh is an agricultural journalist, consultant and farmer. He can be reached by e-mail at kevin@hursh.ca.

Source: producer.com