The Robot and the Wheel in the Sky
On Becoming Obsolescent
There’s an autonomous tractor zipping around the township tonight, headlights cutting across the quarter. Got the whole neighborhood talking. Drew a hell of a crowd, too.
I’ve said it before. The change a person witnesses in a lifetime is staggering. I think about my grandpa. About Chuck, my old boss’s dad. Blows me away.
I can’t remember if it was my second or third year working for Jeff. Doesn’t matter; it was early on. A bunch of us stood around the old wooden Quonset that passed for a shop, barely big enough to fit a twin-screw Chevy inside. On windy days, you might get lucky and stick the beak of the tractor far enough in to keep oil from blowing all over your pants during a lube job.
I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if I can remember what we were talking about. Chuck leaned an elbow on the power washer’s hose reel, smiled, adjusted his glasses, and pointed beneath the short formica countertop. The thing was supposed to be a workbench, but it mostly collected leaking oil jugs, a couple of receiver hitches, and all the dead flies in Marshall County.
“Adam, if you can tell me what that is, I’ll sign the farm over to you today.”
Gee cripes. Usually Chuck said that, but this was one of the first times I ever muttered it, and I haven’t stopped saying it since.
I studied the object. Cast iron. Looked like a rusty donut. I leaned in for a closer look.
“The whole farm, you say?”
I was stalling. The farm’s pink slip slid through my young fingers. I had no idea what I was looking at.
“Beats me, Chuck. Looks like you’ll hang onto the farm another year.”
That’s when he told me about the combine that the donut was attached to, which led to stories about custom harvesting. Before long, pictures came out — I wish I’d asked for one. A convoy of grain trucks with the sidewalls removed, combines strapped on top. These crazy bastards went all the way to Texas and worked their way north.
Can you imagine? Barrelling down two-lane blacktops, no interstates yet. No air conditioning. Screaming banshees with unsecured loads, and if you’ve driven one of these old death traps, you know they handled like a drunken ox. The only control you had was how tight you gripped the wheel before you crashed into the rhubarb, because these trucks had no brakes. None.
The combines were no better. No cabs, just guys in the grain dust smoking Pall Malls under faded umbrellas with about as much UV protection as going shirtless. No power tools. Probably not even ratchets yet.
Hit some strange Midwestern town, thrash wheat all day, play cards and drink beer at the local watering hole, then get up and do it all again. Young and free and away from home, probably its own kind of heaven.
From there, it was 15-foot straight headers. Then 20. 30. Then cabs. Radios. Air conditioning. Air-suspension seats. And autosteer. I’ve always picked on the old timers for being slow to adopt new stuff, and my go-to story is always Chuck’s reaction to Jeff buying the farm’s first GPS.
“The hell do we need that for?” He waved his arm as Jeff went on about efficiency gains and how this was the future. Chuck refused to touch it that first year. Second year, he dabbled. In the third year, sometime in August, around 3:00 p.m., I received a call from Charlie.
“Yaaaaa, this damn thing isn’t working again. Can you come fix it?”
I could hear the frustration in his voice. But it was more than just the equipment. It was something deeper. The same edge I hear in my dad’s voice now when he’s trying to figure out his phone. The same feeling I get watching my boys stare at YouTube videos of OTHER kids playing video games.
But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Every generation reaches a point where the world stops making sense. Like it moved on without you. For Chuck, it was a computer steering his tractor. For my dad, it’s a smartphone. For me, it’s tractors that run themselves.
“Think I’ll just park it and head home. Getting to be too late in the day to drive.”
Fair enough. I told him I’d fix it when I got back and it’d be ready for him in the morning.
I spent my childhood steering tractors. Back then, it was a point of pride to keep the rows straight because every farmer driving by had a keen eye for screwups, skips, and crooked lines. Keeping a chisel plow straight for a half mile is harder than it looks.
I had more pride in those lines than most twelve-year-olds, but I was also the first to embrace the tractor steering itself. Couldn’t wait. My thing has always been looking back at the machine you’re pulling, keeping an eye on things, but more than that, watching the dirt fluff up as a cultivator shovel skids through, or how a disk scoops the earth and flings it backward.
I grew up on tillage. Grew up looking back.
And autosteer allowed me to do that the whole way. What a treat.
So, why was it so easy for me to adapt to new ag tech when Charlie’s generation resisted?
I’m starting to think I get it.
The talk about autonomous tractors scared me. Made me feel human, which is great until you’ve spent 30 years becoming one of the best equipment operators around, and now you’re watching a robot tractor spin circles around a quarter-section.
I’ve known this was coming for over a decade, but hearing the guys talk about it hollowed me out.
I don’t want it. It makes me feel obsolete.
Reminds me of that Twilight Zone episode —The Obsolete Man — where they put a guy on trial just for being unnecessary. Found him guilty of irrelevance, and that was that. I couldn’t wrap my head around that concept when I first saw it as a kid. How do you declare a human being obsolete? But here, at 41, hearing about a robot tractor doing circles in a field I used to work in, I finally understand. That’s the terror. Not that the work changes. That YOU become the thing that’s no longer needed.
But it’s more than just me. I think about our rural towns. Dad had 30 kids in his graduating class from one town. Mine had 30 from two. Soon it’ll be single digits from three.
Maybe every man reaches a point where change comes too fast, even for those like me who have every new gadget. Sometimes you just want to yell at the world to hold its horses for a damned minute.
But that isn’t an option. Steve Perry and the Wheel in the Sky and all that. Keeps on turning. The best a guy can do is grip the tow rope as it drags you along, stumbling and bumbling through a world that all of a sudden doesn’t look the same anymore.
As depressing as this sounds, there’s a strange comfort in it. The change won’t stop. Just the way it is. Just as it was for Chuck. For my grandpa. My dad. And now me.
It’s almost midnight on a Saturday. We were supposed to be harvesting sugar beets, but the heat shut us down until Monday. Feels like the universe handed me a little gift, an unexpected weekend with my boys after three weeks apart.
They’re glued to their iPads in a way that would’ve horrified me as a kid, but they’re also more empathetic than my generation ever was. More in tune with feelings. Less likely to be the assholes we were. The world they’re inheriting won’t need equipment operators, but maybe it’ll need something we can’t even imagine yet. Same way Chuck couldn’t have imagined a tractor steering itself, and I can’t imagine watching someone else play video games for entertainment.
The wheel keeps turning, and my boys are already adapted to speeds I’m just now feeling.
Harvest is the hardest time, but somehow the most rewarding. You appreciate these little doses more. You’re more present. The world doesn’t seem as frightening when you focus on what matters.
The pace of change keeps accelerating, faster with every pressing turn.
Hang on or get left behind, and enjoy the ride even when the throttle sticks and the vandals steal the brake handle.
The township’s buzzing about the robot tractor again. And here I am, less confused, more grateful, just along for the ride.
"The world doesn’t seem as frightening when you focus on what matters." Adam, thanks for reminding me... Great read!
Another gem