Opinion: A farmer’s endorsement of the mobile phone
© Adobe Stock In my brief and inglorious military career, we were once quizzed as to who in our infantry platoon had the most dangerous bit of kit.
“Easy,” we thought. “The machine gunner, the mortar section, the sniper.” All sadly wrong – the most lethal person in the group was the signaller.
With his radio he could link us to the world, bring in the backup and vaporise limitless numbers of baddies just by communicating.
See also: Opinion – unearthing farm history can become addictive
About the author
The inventions that transformed farming and relieved the peasantry of the need to feed themselves so they could get all urban and start the Industrial Revolution are in every history book.
I remember in my schooldays hearing about the Sumerian plough, Jethro Tull’s seed drill, the threshing machine, the “Green Revolution”.
Although it’s clearly not specifically a farming invention, I would put the mobile phone alongside, or maybe above, all these for its transformative effect on the way we go about our profession.
In our pockets, and on our wrists, we have a communication system a hundred times lighter and more capable than any Army radio set.
For my generation, and doubtless everyone born since, the mobile phone and subsequent smartphone have revolutionised our ability to farm and made us better at our game and more efficient than ever.
How much time and money did we waste, not to mention all the extra stress imposed, before the arrival of these incredible devices?
It’s not necessarily an age thing, either – I know farmers of 80 who monitor their cattle grazing on smartphones, WhatsApp their market fieldsmen and pay you online as soon as they receive your invoice.
I also know contractors of 25 who can’t seem to return a missed call despite the fact they spend 14 hours a day in a tractor cab full of hands-free phone technology.
Using apps, in the past few days I’ve juggled my finances and monitored the bank balance while waiting for the dying drips of the old BPS to reach my account.
Only yesterday I shared a video with the country’s foremost combine breaker as he struggled to understand what obscure part of my TX I was referring to based on my uneducated description.
I was guided to a hole in a fence someone had noticed by the What3Words app and identified a Red List bird species chattering away in the hedge using Merlin.
People deride the young for their obsession with social media. Bring it on, I say. The lad who used to work for us was fond of Snapchatting pictures of his ploughing.
Knowing that his mates would all be weighing in with their opinions, he made sure he got out of the cab and set every furrow and skimmer perfectly to avoid their derision.
Even the fanatics must admit that some tractor driving can get pretty damn dull. Not anymore.
With a cab full of podcasts and music, I was rather sad when my 10-hour ballast-rolling stint came to an end the other day, and I was tempted to do a few more laps of the field until the murderer was revealed in my current audiobook.
I’m really not tech savvy. I had never tried typing on a computer until I was aged 20 at Harper Adams.
I’m not obsessed with my phone, but I’d struggle to live without it. And I haven’t even got a very good one, either.