Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

The Pennsylvania Farm Show opened Saturday. Larry Hamilton of Ulysses was making maple cotton candy at the Food Court. There’s lots of technology on display at the farm show. Agriculture tech changes over the years, doesn’t it!

Here, we get glimpses of some of the different eras of agricultural technology at the annual “engine show” in late summer every year.

My dad described how hay was mowed (mown?) when he was a lad. A row of men with scythes stood a certain distance apart and walked across the hayfield, swinging their scythes in rhythm, each man’s swath joining that of his neighbors. Dad thought it was quite a coming of age when he was allowed to take up a scythe and participate in that line-up. He was about 11. When I was his little tag-along daughter I used to see him use that same scythe for incidental grass or weed cutting.

Mown hay dried on the ground a day or so, was raked into windrows partially dried, then formed into hay doodles to dry some more, then hand-pitched onto horse-drawn hay wagons and hauled to the barn and spider-forked into the hay mows by a pulley system in a track in the top of the barn.

Tractors, mowing machines, hay rakes (ordinary and side-delivery) and hay balers brought change. Individual farmers could scale up their hay production and the sizes of their herds, with improved hay crop production and lower labor costs.

Should hay bales be round or square? That was the topic of many a debate and much copy in the farm magazines. The rectangular bales were the kind used for many years. They could be stacked neatly in the lofts.

But the cylindrical bales (not the large, white plastic encased outdoor storage kind seen now) repelled water in the field, and created more ventilation in the loft (making spontaneous combustion barn fires less likely). They could be unrolled in the manger, conveniently distributing their contents to the stanchioned cows eagerly awaiting their shares.

Eventually Dad got a forage harvester and put lots of grass silage away for winter use. More nutrients, three crops a season instead of two, no worries about hay not drying because of rain during the harvest operations. Grass silage had to be fermented so as to “keep” through to the next pasture season, as did corn silage, but some thought “curing” grass smelled worse. Cows loved it, and it boosted milk production.

Those were changes in the technology of producing just one kind of food for farm animals. I didn’t even mention the changes in planting and fertilizing pasture and hay grasses, and the increased use of clover, alfalfa and trefoil in the same period. The annual farm show was one showcase for the changes, and a great place for farmers to keep up with developments in their industry.

Far from Harrisburg, International CES, the consumer electronics expo, is about to begin. From what I read its main theme will be the Internet of Things.

What kinds of things? Things that exist now, and others that don’t, and haven’t been imagined yet.

For instance, there’s a tennis racket that can be connected to the internet. It has tiny sensors embedded in the handle, to measure and transmit data about the player’s strokes. It’s called Babolat Play Pure Drive. Presumably it will help a player, and maybe his or her coach, improve. For $399, it should be useful or fun or both.

Mention of the French company suggests to me a bovine version of the old joke about Stradivarius and his neighbor’s cat.  “Mr. Babolat, have you seen my cow? Say, that’s a nice racket you have!” Babolat pioneered the use of cow-gut strings for tennis rackets, around 1865.

Yahoo’s new CEO, Marissa Mayer, will be one of the keynote speakers. Maybe she will explain why she has abolished telecommuting by the company’s workers, a move that has many of them majorly bummed.

Others will be Kazuo Hirai, Sony’s boss pern, and John Chambers from Cisco. We expect them to come out in favor of  internetting everything, don’t we?

CES always has acres of exhibit space, and this year, more than ever. That could be because some of the new products, or at least concept models, will be quite bulky.

Take, for instance, cars. I-connected cars will be more efficient, factor in the weather, and cut down on accidents and injuries. Eventually they’ll be individual Greyhounds, and we’ll leave the driving to them—you think?

We used to think of smart devices as those that had on-board computers or connected to computers. New generation smart gadgets can interact with the ubiquitous smart phones and tablets.

Earlier devices that helped us be healthier or entertained us were dependent on batteries, and those needed to be charged often. But battery life has expanded logarithmically.

There are scary aspects to the trend toward internet connected things. Security is a biggie. These devices will collect and store lots of information about their users and how the devices are used. How secure will that information be?

On the other hand, or at least wrist, there will be devices that can remind, entertain, connect to others, check our vital signs, and turn our laundry or cooking appliances on and off. And maybe even tell time.

Some of the same people who attend the farm show might enjoy CES, or at least part of it, seems to me. Farming has become higher tech year after year, and farm families enjoy gadgets and conveniences along with the rest of the population. Amish farmers who don’t want electrical service in their homes have computers and internet connections in little outbuildings out in the fields, supplying weather information and helping them with marketing, buying supplies and so on. I suppose they use cells and wireless—just not in the house.