Today we learned about an interesting combination of topics that seemed to be largely philosophically opposed to one another, those being precision agriculture and the local food movement. During our visit with Kevin Butt, we discussed farm safety which is definitely important, but what really got me thinking about things was his obvious fascination with any new type of agricultural technology. The most impressive one by far that he discussed is not currently used but he seems to believe that it will be used in the near future. This would be a drone that is able to locate weeds in fields and kill them with lasers. While this was the most outlandish technology we discussed, there were many more examples that were both impressive but also concerned me in that they seemed to be further degrading the relationship between humanity and the land. Many argue that this is the only way to feed the ever increasing human population. I’m not sure that this is the case and that claim could probably be debated, but even if it is, then maybe the entire human population should not continue to be fed.

On the other side of the argument was the man who we talked to at the Wallace Center who was in charge of the local farmer’s market. He was an advocate for the return to local food economies and Kevin Butt would have most likely been opposed to his views. It was interesting to see how passionate both he and Kevin were about the different work that they did even though their work was so drastically different. I wanted to ask him about how he would respond to the argument that his method of feeding the population would not actually feed the entire population, but I never got the chance.