“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
That snippet of dialogue from Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises is a handy summation of the nature of change.
Things go along for a while — often a good long while — in a certain mould, and it eventually comes to just be the way of things: immutable, unmovable and inexorable.
Think of the postwar geopolitical power balance that was the Cold War. That was two mostly evenly matched sides battling it out in the shadows through espionage, proxy wars and other means short of open conflict.
Read Also
Manitoba sclerotinia picture mixed for 2025
Variations in weather and crop development in this year’s Manitoba canola fields make blanket sclerotinia outlooks hard to pin down
Those of us of a certain age remember growing up through this, and its seeming permanence.
Then, suddenly, things began to change, starting with a power vacuum in the Kremlin following the death of Soviet leader Leonid Breshnev.
His next three successors were short lived, with the longest tenure being just over two years in office.
Then in 1985 the eighth — and final — leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, took office.
Gorbachev moved quickly and introduced two policies — glasnost (openness) and peristroika (reconstruction) in 1986 that opened the flood gates of change.
By the end of 1989 the Berlin Wall had fallen, the Soviet Bloc had dissolved and the Cold War was over — all developments that were so unexpected that the U.S. intelligence services famously failed to predict them.
Technology also tends to change like this as well. The untried so-called ‘bleeding edge’ becomes the ‘leading edge’ where things become more practical. Next comes early commercialization. Then further research and refinement. Eventually economies of scale are achieved and, suddenly, the technology is everywhere.
Take the first computers for example. There was Charles Baggage’s difference engine, a mechanical calculator built in the 1820s. Then there was Konrad Zuse’s Z1, designed and built in his parents’ Berlin living room between 1936 and 1938, which was the world’s first functional modern computer.
After that, computers found niche, specialty uses. Collosus was the name of the first programmable electric computer, and it broke German codes for the British in the latter half of the Second World War, for example.
As the name Collosus gives away, these early mainframe computers were enormous. The ENIAC computer at the University of Pennsylvania, built in 1946, occupied about 1,800 square feet, used 18,000 vacuum tubes, and weighed 50 tons.
By the early 1960s commercial computer companies like IBM and Digital Equipment Corporation were producing so-called ‘minicomputers’ the size of a small car.
By the mid-1960s desktop-sized programmable calculators were available, the ‘adding machines’ of my youth.
By the early 1980s, the neighbour kids and I were playing video games on a Commodore Vic 20, and just a few short years later, computers were suddenly everywhere, and changing everything.
Agriculture is, on many fronts, just about to surpass the adding machine era, and is rapidly closing in on the Vic 20 moment, when the new technology really starts to shake things up.
As you will read in the Jan. 20 issue of the Co-operator, there are researchers in British Columbia who say cellular agriculture is set to shake up the animal agriculture sector, with dairy producers being especially vulnerable to disruption.
Plus, John Deere recently announced it will be releasing its first commercially available driverless tractors. While nobody is exactly sure what the equipment of the future will look like, it’s becoming more obvious that much of it will be autonomous, something that has profound and far-reaching implications.
And in our front-page story Allan Dawson explores another, albeit a bit less high-tech, development that’s going to affect Manitoba farmers.
The next generation of biofuels are here, in the form of renewable diesel. It represents a fundamental change from the first biodiesel, which was simply animal or vegetable oil blended with diesel.
That wasn’t the simplest thing for the petroleum industry. It had to be handled separately, and there were limits to how much could be blended.
The new product is identical to traditional diesel fuel, and can be handled using the existing infrastructure.
Because of the low-tillage production system used widely to produce it in Canada canola could see great demand as a feedstock for it.
And, as another recent report here pointed out, there’s great potential to enhance canola’s productivity through gene editing technology.
Clearly the wave of change is upon us, and will only grow as it crests.
The job of everyone in the sector is now making sure they’re not a typewriter manufacturer at the dawn of the computer age.
