"British reporters suspect an international cover-up of a global disaster in progress... and they're right."
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Eclectic Perambulations in the Noosphere
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The farm of the 21st century as predicted by Thomas Midgley in a 1935 address to the American Chemical Society. I don't know what's worse; horses with droppings the size of Volkswagens or a soft-boiled egg that takes a week to eat.
And you thought GM crops were a worry.
"However, to run the farm of tomorrow requires more than beast or muscle. You need the atom.
One of the forgotten promises of the nascent Atomic Age was that the incredibly cheap, limitless power of the atom would revolutionise farming by irrigating vast areas of desert until the Sahara became a second Eden, Death Valley rivaled the great prairie states and the Gobi desert turned green and abolished the threat of famine from Asia for all time
Furthermore, radioactive isotopes would play their part by introducing radioactive tracers to enhance agricultural science and the development of artificial atomic mutation to produce new crops.
Score: Zero for the atomic irrigation, plus ten for the isotopes, and minus several million for the mutants-- if you count Peter Graves's tiny error in judgment."
"The real problem with farms is that they're so... well, agricultural. How much better it would be if they could be replaced with something more overtly technological; a factory farm, if you will.
That idea has been around ever since Hugo Gernsback published his 1911 novel Ralph 124c41+, wherein he conceived of the farms of 600 years in the future as gigantic hothouses covering several square miles wherein crops are grown with artificial heat via geothermal wells, chemical fertilisers and electrical stimulation. And forget ploughs, tractors and hordes of farm hands. Cultivation and harvesting are achieved with only twenty men by way of all manner of machinery built right into the building's walls and ceiling like some sort of agrarian assembly line that increases efficiency to the point where five crops a year are brought in instead of one or two.
Nor are we talking about hothouse tomatoes or strawberries. We mean wheat, oats, rye and all the other staples of life.
Indeed, some farm factory advocates even went so far as to say that even giant hothouses smacked too much of sod busting and that the purest way to go was to build farms in tremendous underground vaults with vast fields of corn wafting in the ventilation draughts.
All in all, about as bucolic as a salt mine."
"But why settle for the odd remote controlled whatsit on the farm? If you have enough money and are deficient enough in common sense, retool the plantation with an army of robots. Then you can just sit back in your flying howdah and supervise the whole operation by computer.
Except for mucking out the stables, of course.
Even computers have their dignity."
