Technical Difficulties

I am grateful for my foresighted decision to leave the world of cyber security and become a full-time farmer. After nearly 20 years of being out of the business, I am still on enough mailing lists that a headline warning me 70% of the Internet is in danger from a vulnerability discovered via AI caused me to open the email and see who the culprit was causing such a stir. Fortunately, the only thing I need to patch these days are tires that pick up nails and holes in the fence. My cubicle is now a 10 x 10 pop-up at the farmers market.

But that does not mean technology does not impact my life.

For as long as I have gone to market, I have used Microsoft Publisher to make my weekly signs. Over the years I have been through an assortment of signage, including chalkboard, which does not work well in the rain and dry-erase boards which cause problems when your markers dry up, or worse, you forget them. Laminated signs used week after week end up looking ratty after a few months and good luck if you need to change your prices. Because inventory can change week to week, I opted to print out inventory and price lists on a weekly basis and attach my signage to a sandwich board. Customers can instantly see what’s available and know what it costs. This method has worked well for me over 20 years, until now.

This month spells the end for Microsoft Publisher. Now that software has become a subscription, companies can make it go away, even if you do not want it to. I thought about dragging one of my old machines out of the closet so that I could keep the hundreds of .pub files I have active, but then I realized those machines probably would not play nice with newer printer drivers and I would be back in the weeds again.

After reading up on the end-of-life notes, I saw where if one had a large number of files to convert there was a shell script that could be written for mass conversion. This kind of technology is not beyond me. I made a very good living at one time through using this type of programming, but each time I ran the scripts, errors were returned. Next, I tried converting the files to an extension of a different program manually. No matter what I used, I could not save any of my signs due to their mixture of graphics and text. My ubiquitous checkered borders that I have used on all of my signs was going to have to go. Actually, I would do better to start from scratch and scrap the last 20 years of signage—the end of an era.

But my software woes pale in comparison to that of many other farmers when it comes to technical difficulties. Another headline caught my eye about how farmers have to use old equipment. No, we don’t have to, but many choose to do so, since practically every modern piece of farm equipment produced in the last 10 years is completely computerized, connected to the Internet, and made with plastic and composite components, all of which are proprietary. Visit any full-time farm, especially multigenerational operations, and you will find a shop complete with welding equipment, maybe a lathe. There will be boxes of nuts and bolts, screws, and tools. That pile of old abandoned equipment behind the barn is not junk, but spare parts. There is a reason that farmers tend to be brand loyal when it comes to their equipment. At the local equipment auctions, sometimes the broken stuff brings in a good price because that particular machinery isn’t made anymore and getting new parts for anything that breaks is impossible. Over the years I have watched as local machine shops and welders go out of business because much of the farm equipment today is not made out of iron. Whoever comes up with a 3-D print shop for broken plastic parts would be a popular person, but they would probably get sued for patent infringement.

In July of this year, John Deere settled a class action lawsuit for right-to-repair allowing farmers to own and operate diagnostic repair tools that were once only available to licensed dealerships. Can you imagine having thousands of acres to harvest and in the middle of the process while trying to beat the rain your tractor decides to update its software and suddenly shuts down? Yes, that’s what happened over and over again to farmers who had spent upwards of a half million dollars for a piece of equipment, whose warranty and service contract would be voided if they tinkered with the software in order to get it to run. Not only where they locked out of their equipment, sometimes it would take days, if not weeks, to get a service technician to their location, who only needed to punch in a code in order for the machine to once again fire up and run. This is why I use a tractor that was built in the same year I was born and it is not a green one.

I spent the first half of my life building cutting-edge technology and now I’m spending the second half trying to get away from it. I think I’ll go back to chalkboards and dry erase markers.