        Recently I attended an event in a farm field, one designed to teach young students a bit about the importance of farming by showing them what is grown by producers that goes into a pizza.
               It is a great project with its roots in Yorkton, but now mimicked with food farms planted as student teaching tools around the province.
               As great as the program is, it was one of those random conversations one has at such events which fired the thought processes for this column.
               I ended up in a conversation with a small group of men talking about farming, in particular the amount of technology which is built into a new four-wheel drive tractor, (more than in an early space shuttle they say).
               But the conversation was not thought provoking just based on the computer circuitry in a tractor today.
               What was intriguing to me was the question about who owns the tech?
               A farmer buys the tractor, but does he own the software, or the data it creates?
               The Internet has a number of stories about farmers looking for ways to ‘hack’ software in their tractors, believing they should be able to do what they want with a tractor they purchased.
               It seems a reasonable concept for a farmer, but it is just another example of a growing list of things on the farm that producers have little control over, to the point one might suggest they are back to be little more than tenant farmers.
               That didn’t sit well when I suggested the same to the fellows at the ‘pizza farm’ but follow along and draw your own conclusion.
               A farmer buys land, in partnership with a lending institution, paying it off just about the time he sells out to retire to a condo in Phoenix. A family member, or neighbour borrows to buy him out and the cycle repeats.
               The farmer borrows to cover seeding, usually with the caveat he buy crop insurance, a decision taken out of his hands.
               The farmer does get to decide what to grow, but once that one decision is made, the chemicals may be controlled because of crop traits tied to specific chemicals.
               The market may be predetermined with the planting choice as well, with production contracts increasingly in place.
               Of course keeping a portion of production to plant the following year may eventually fade away with the so-called terminator gene an all too real possibility. The terminator gene is a specific genetic sequence inserted by scientists into a seed's DNA that renders the seed and the crop it produces sterile.
               The farmer wants to drain a slough, but didn’t get the paperwork in to have it approved by someone else.
               He was going to spray one field but being next door to an organic producer he wasn’t willing to in case there was a wind.
               In the fall he was going to burn the stubble, but he lived in an area with restrictions, so he couldn’t.
               But the farmer stills feels more in control of decisions than his counterparts in many European countries where government red tape is thick.
               The decisions have become a very controlled process with producers guided down a particular line, not so different from cattle in a set of well-designed corrals, and that is just the reality of much of what they do.Â
