iPie

Folks tend to think of farming as a bucolic back-to-the-land vocation with lots of manual labor. It is, I won’t deny that, but many are shocked to find out how much automation, technology and even robotics are now routine in modern agriculture, especially on organic and regenerative farms.I have mentors in their 70’s and 80’s who baled hay with horse-drawn equipment when they were in their teens. This past week my neighbor baled the hay on this farm with his half-million-dollar tractor using a mower that cut a ten-foot swath and a machine that spit out 60-inch round bales weighing in around 900 pounds. They were scattered about the fields where I fetched them with a skid loader—basically a steel cage on a diesel motor with a mechanical arm topped with three long spikes—to store them in a pole barn for use this winter. The thermometer read 91, the weather app said feels like 100.I was grateful for this technology. Physical labor in summer heat is no picnic, but a necessity when the crop is ready.Your farmers at Central Farm Markets employ an assortment of technologies that make their jobs more efficient and safer for workers. To explain the different technologies used by farmers today, I’m going to deconstruct one of the quintessential Fourth-of-July goodies that have been showing up at picnics since the very first Independence Day celebration—cherry pie.Let’s start with the crust—flour and butter. This old farm is littered with stone disks with a hole in the center of all sizes. Younger visitors always ask what they are—mill stones for grinding grains. Pennsylvania and Maryland were powerhouses for gristmills due to their waterways and good soil for growing grains.Most flour is made from wheat, but it can be made by grinding any starchy plant. Instead of grindstones, modern wheat passes through a series of technologies--harvesters, separators, cleaners, blowers—before passing through large steel rollers for grinding.Similarly, the butter has come a long way from hand-milking, separating the cream by skimming and churning in a wood vat with either paddles or a dasher to robotic milkers, centrifuged cream separation, stainless steel drum churns with augers for expelling excess liquids from the solids prior to packaging.Now that our lovely crust is in the pan, let’s fill it with fresh cherries.Picking fruit has a long history of manual labor, especially with transient migrant workers following the harvests depending upon what’s in season. Talk to any orchardist and they’ll tell you their labor woes, especially given this anti-immigrant federal administration. Anyone in agriculture knows that the harvest can’t wait.Mechanical harvesters have reduced the amount of workers needed to bring in a harvest. Driving through the back roads near Gettysburg recently, I witnessed a modern cherry-picker in action. An entire tree was harvested in minutes. Similarly, those same cherries need to be pitted. Anyone who has ever pitted a flat or even a quart by hand will attest to the task being time-consuming and messy. Once again, there’s a machine for that.And the sugar? The equipment used to harvest both beet and cane sugar looks like it belongs on the set of a dystopian science fiction movie. No more slashing with machetes.Agriculturalists have always been innovators to solve problems. Today farmers often use leading-edge technologies combined with time-honored knowledge. Machines are engineered and built to solve problems. If they don’t save time and money, on to the scrap heap (or eBay) they go!Pie a la mode? Yes, please, even if the robots made the ice cream. It’s something I have to look forward to after getting all the hay in the barn.Happy Independence Day. I hope it includes pie.