Rural America Needs to Band Together Against Corporate Greed

Last year, John Deere announced plans to go 100 percent robotic by 2030. That’s right: in just four more years, the world’s largest tractor manufacturer plans to replace every corn and soybean farmer with robots.

Farmers won’t own the machines, of course. Right now they can’t even repair a machine because the software is only licensed to them. (And with consolidation, they don’t own their choice of seed, fertilizer, pesticide, or herbicide. And they don’t have much choice where to sell what they grow, either.)

More time off from driving the tractor sounds pretty good ‘til it starts sounding like unemployment. Farmers who enjoy watching the game from their cab better get ready, because soon enough tractors won’t even come with cabs.

We can focus on tariffs and trade policy and all those other things impacting farmers now. But without a dramatic change, those policies will affect only a handful of very rich and powerful people who are buying out everyone else.

Companies like Agrobot and Tortuga Agri-tech are already selling robots that pick fruit and vegetables and weed bots that can tell baby ragweed from baby carrots, god bless ‘em. In fact, it’s hard to find an article that isn’t absolutely glowing about “agritecture” and “agri-tech.”

What’s driving all this shift to automation? Companies might say it’s labor shortages or climate change. But really it’s unfettered profit-mongering at the expense of rural America. This has been building for decades. It’s “get big or get out” on steroids, sped up exponentially by Big Tech.

What does that mean for rural America?

Fully robotic farming translates into tech so expensive that the last remaining farmers will have to fold. They’ll retire or move into cities looking for a decent day job — which means more people searching for fewer good jobs. Or they’ll stay and become a permanent leasing class — leasing land, leasing equipment, suffering all the risk with no reward in equity.

Commuters and remote workers will make up the remaining rural residents. Where I live in rural Iowa, more than 80 percent of our jobs are outside the local House district. Most folks commute to Iowa City, Davenport, Muscatine, or Cedar Rapids. Almost all of our dollars for groceries, home repair, clothes, and health care are spent there, not in nearby Mechanicsville, Clarence, or Bennett.

Just imagine the upside for these corporations of finally getting the rest of us off our land.

Massive machines can drive themselves down the gravel with no fear of hitting a pickup truck. Drones can spray pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides across millions of miles of the same crop without worrying about property lines. Their taxes will pay only for roads and storage facilities that support these machines.

No more schools, bars, churches. No more downtowns, Rotary, or Lions clubs. No more FFA or 4-H. No more fire or police departments, except as needed to protect this high-tech property from vandals.

I can just imagine the CEO bonuses for finally pulling this off.

Governments worldwide have been moving people off their land for decades, often with corporate help. Americans are not the exception. Our kids who’ve left for better places will sell at auction to the highest bidder, some corporate lawyer in flannel and jeans. Our homes and orchards will be bulldozed.

We’ll be right where corporations want us — desperate and alone. But we don’t have to be.

In rural America’s not-so-distant past, coalminers and meatpackers and others from different backgrounds found they were not the enemy the boss said they were. More recently, health care professionals wanting better working conditions found that service workers are not the insignificant people the boss makes them seem.

We can continue to define ourselves by how those at the top see us. Or we can enjoy not only comfort but power in solidarity and defending our common interest.

Oligarchs do it all the time. So can we.

This piece was adapted for republication by OtherWords.org.