Computers in Agriculture?

Matt Larson
Essay 3
DTC 375 Farman
3-12-09
WC 966

Computers in Agriculture?

I interviewed Rodney Larson, a 65-year-old man who should be retired right now. Rodney has been in the agriculture industry for more than 37 years. He has grown many different kinds of crops including Alfalfa, beans, wheat, sweet corn, sunflowers, potatoes, grain corn, blue grass seed, timothy hay, sugar beets, and soybeans. He has held many positions as well moving up from just a lowly sugar beet field man to an area director, and now he is the General Farm Manager in Cambridge, England. AgriNorthwest asked him to move to England to manage the entire England farm for 3 years. With much deliberation with his family and his wife he decided to go.

With being in Agriculture for so many years, Rodney has seen technology change in his industry right before his eyes. Technology has revolutionized the way agriculture is done today. Rodney has been at the AgriNorthwest Prior Project for 37 years, which he has seen it grow to where they now farm over 80,000 acres. The new technology has brought new farm equipment such as harvesters and planters. Talking about computers, Rodney said, “Computers streamlined and opened doors to collect and analyze data and to easily see means of improvement.”


Matt: What sort of writing method did you use before you started using computers?

Rodney: I used a typewriter for all the formal writing and documents, that is an electric typewriter, I’m not that old. For normal documents, however, I just used pen and paper.

Matt: What was the process like and how long did it take you to finish the entire process?

Rodney: The process seemed to take an eternity to what I use now. With typewriting you would have to double check or triple check all of your spelling and grammar quite often. If you made a mistake you would either have to erase it or use white out, which you would apply with a little brush much like fingernail polish, then would have to retype it all over again. The whole process was very time consuming, probably 3 to 4 times as long as now. I hated the darn process. I would always write my paper with pen and paper and then find a girl to type it for me.

Matt: How do you take notes at meetings and at other functions now?

Rodney: When I’m at meeting I use my computer to take notes now. It is just so much easier. It’s easier to store, keep track of.

Matt: What other uses do you use computers for in your normal workday?

Rodney: Oh lets see, I use it for so much now, I use it for research information, track data, analyze that data and information to make adjustments in growing crops to get better yields. I also use them to communicate with my workers, its nice because it’s less phone or radio time, which allows them to work more with out me having to bug them.

Matt: What was the transition like when you first started to use computers?

Rodney: Well as long they work it was a very easy transition. The problem comes when the computers don’t work, I don’t how to fix them at all so it takes men to come in to fix them and it becomes a huge pain and makes it very hard to work. The computers I use now are so much easier than the first one I used. Now they have spell check and many other functions that make the ease of use much simpler.

Matt: What are the downfalls if any are there to your use of computers?

Rodney: Well really the only downfall to computers is I’m stuck in the office more. I don’t get the face-to-face contact with my managers and workers. It also takes me out of the field so I don’t get the hands on experience to see how the crops are coming along.

Matt: What were some of the downfalls of using a typewriter?

Rodney: As for typewriters, where do I start, as I said earlier the spelling and grammar has to be correct or you have to erase or whiteout whatever the mistake was. Also, lets say you wrote out a paragraph and didn’t like what it said; you would have to completely start over with an entire new sheet of paper. Also if you ended up running out of ribbon you had to stop typing to replace it. Which stops your writing process and your ideas stop flowing through your head. With a computer you can finish whatever you need to write, then when you’re done you just have find a printer. It is so much easier. One other thing with typewriters is to enter any number data you had to use a calculator and a typewriter, that process was very painful as well as extremely time consuming.

Matt: Which of the two technologies to you prefer?

Rodney: Oh computers without a doubt. In 1975, I created the first budget on a computer that had ever been used in the company. Computers streamlined and opened doors to collect and analyze data and to easily see means of improvement. Writing also became much easier and that allows ideas to flow easier. You can pull data from the Internet and things that can add to papers such as pictures and graphs. I really like computers for business and home uses. When it comes to spelling I’m the worlds worst speller, computers keep me out of trouble. I can keep track of spreadsheets over years, where I can analyze them in minutes instead of hours. Computers also enable me to create crop production scenarios that greatly enhance production and fine tune progress with little effort.