By Ginger S. Myers

Farming's farming. Plant the seed; harvest the crop. Chickens come from eggs and eggs come from chickens; whichever came first, we eat them both. The basics of farming never change, or do they?

Ever since farmers threw down their sticks and picked up hoes, new technology has been instrumental in improving agricultural production, product quality, farm income and rural well-being. Agriculture's new technology for the 21st century ranges from information technology to satellite imagery to gene splicing. These are not technocolor dreams for the electronic farmhand of the future, but working technologies employed by small and large farms alike.

According to the National Agricultural Statistics Service, Maryland farmers are third in Internet access and fourth in on-farm computer use in the nation. Farmers use their computer for record-keeping assistance, purchasing equipment, supplies and farm inputs, commodity marketing and trading, and collecting information before making local purchases.

Hit with the lowest commodity prices in 14 years, farmers are increasingly looking to the Internet to hike their sales and cut costs. The Web has become their global marketplace. There are a growing number of online auction sites cropping up to cater to the $826 billion U.S. farming industry. A few of the largest sites include directag.com, xsag.com and rooster.com. Industry analysts predict that, by 2004, agriculture will constitute the fifth highest industry sector for all business-to-business e-commerce.

The use of computers coupled with geographic information systems has spawned the new farm management trend known as "precision agriculture." Instead of managing a field as a whole, the philosophy of precision agriculture is to manage individual areas in a field. Utilizing the personal computer, satellite positioning systems, geographic information systems, automated machine guidance, infield and remote sensing and telecommunications, farmers can analyze a field for the plant and environmental factors that affect yield, return to the same spot time after time, and control the application of inputs.

The potential benefits of precision agriculture include higher yields, lower production costs, less pollution through poor use of chemicals, better information for management decisions and better farm records essential for business planning.

Biotechnology has been used in agriculture and food production for many years. Examples include the use of fermentation processes to produce bread, beer and wine and saving the seed of the highest yielding plants for sowing the following year. Gene technology now allows for amazing advances in plant breeding. Gene splicing and genetic modification techniques are opening up the possibility of not only transferring precise traits from related species but also creating entirely different organisms. The results include better yielding plants with greater disease, pest and drought resistance. In 1998, as much as 44% of the soybean, cotton and corn crops were grown from biotech seeds. A majority of processed food in our grocery stores now contains engineered ingredients.

Embryo transfer procedures have developed into an "on the farm" practice in both the dairy and livestock industries. Transgenic livestock are being employed in pharmaceutical production around the world. These animals yield a unique harvest of such medical miracles as easily digested milk for premature or lactose intolerant infants, insulin for diabetics, heart valves and veins for surgical patients and skin for burn victims.

Just as agriculture was transformed from hand to horsepower and later from horses to tractors, technology and economics will drive the future of agriculture. These advances will bring about many changes in the way a farm is managed and in the training needed to operate a farm. A John Deere article titled, "Zeroing in on Precision Farming," summarized these trends with the statement, "Agriculture is about to enter a brave new space-age world, so new and different it exhilarates some ... and scares others."