Farming and IT (and a Very Bad Headline)

The NYTimes has an article today on the topic of information technology and farming, focusing on an Indiana farmer, Kip Tom, who handles 20,000 acres, up from 700 acres in the 1970's. The article is not bad, hitting the big data involved in precision farming, the use of drones, the rising status of women, etc. etc.  It includes a quote from a former farmer who now is one of the 25 employees of the Tom operation, which includes 6 Tom family members.

It's titled: "Working the Land and the Data, Technology Offers Some Family Owned Farms a Chance To Thrive and Compete With Giant Agribusinesses".  While the headline is fine, the subhead is worst one I can remember in a good while.  It's based on this sentence in the article, a line which is undermined by the rest of the article: "It [technology] is also helping them grow to compete with giant agribusinesses].  The truth, more clear in the accompanying video, is that by going heavily into technology, and being smart enough to pick up land in the 1980's, when values had crashed, the Tom family were able to expand and thrive, when their neighbors went broke and sold their own operations.

Consider just the data in the article: the 20,000 acres of the current operation represents the equivalent of 28 farms in the 700 acre range from the 1970's.  And those 700 acre farms in themselves probably represented several smaller farms from the era of horsepower (which Tom's father remembers his father plowing with). Leesburg, IN, by the way, has lost about 10 percent of its population since 2000.

At the risk of over-analyzing, I suspect the writer was impressed with Mr. Tom, considered him one of the good guys.  Logically then, if he's a good guy, he must be competing with bigger operations, those soulless agribusinesses.  A good guy can't be someone who succeeds by driving others out of business.  Yes, "succeeds by driving...." is harsh, and not the way we usually think about individuals.  Because of the invisible hand of the market, it's not any one individual/enterprise bankrupting others, it's just the way things are; some people win and some people don't.