Kerby Anderson
If he was alive today, John Deere might not even recognize the company that bears his name. As a blacksmith, he realized that farmers needed a better plow for the dense black soil of the Midwest. He took a broken steel saw at a mill and fashioned it into a plow. Soon he was mass producing them.
Today John Deere manufactures lots of agricultural technology. I would recommend you visit the John Deere Pavilion and get a tour. But if you want to understand the future of agriculture, you might also pay attention to the fact that company is building robots.
That is just one of the insights in the new book, The Coming Wave. We are going to be seeing robots and artificial intelligence devices everywhere, although we might not realize that we are seeing them. Autonomous tractors and combines may not look like the robots we see in science fiction movies, but they will be doing more and more of the agriculture of the future.
Robots will be planting, tending, and harvesting crops with a high level of precision. Drones will be watching livestock. Computers and robots will be measuring soil quality, moisture, and weather conditions.
Some agricultural robots will be hard to see because they will be the size of bees. There has been some concern (perhaps overblown) about the reduction in bee populations. That is why Walmart filed a patent for robot bees to cross-pollinate crops autonomously. A RoboBee created at one research institute measures about half the size of a paper clip and weighs less than one-tenth of a gram. It flies using “artificial muscles” compromised of materials that contract when a voltage is applied.
Robot technology is changing agriculture. In fact, robots may soon be helping to feed the world.

Kerby Anderson
Yesterday I mentioned the book by Frank Thomas, What’s the Matter with Kansas? Rich Lowry suggests that there might be a future book with the title, What’s Matter with People of Color? The point he is making is that Democrats have always assumed people of color will vote for their party. That doesn’t look like it will happen in this election.
The results of two polls illustrate the dramatic change. A New York Times poll a few months ago had Trump beating Biden among Hispanic voters 46–40. Recently, a Wall Street Journal poll found that 30 percent of African American men say they are “definitely or probably” going to vote for Trump. Although other polls aren’t as dramatic, something seems to be happening among potential minority voters.
Rich Lowry suggests the problem has been that Democrats lump all sorts of people with diverse backgrounds and demographic characteristics into the category “people of color.” Many of these ethnic groups are not supportive of the woke politics that have been promoted over the last few years.
Hispanics, for example, are much more like the rest of America. One poll shows that 69 percent of Americans say the country is on the wrong track. An even higher percentage (72%) of Hispanics say the same thing. About a third (30%) of the country says inflation and the economy is the top issue. Once again, an even higher percentage (42%) of Hispanics say it is.
What might this mean in this election? Hillary Clinton won Hispanic voters by nearly 40 points. Joe Biden won them by 23 points but will probably see a lower percentage in this election. Those potential votes might go to Donald Trump. I predict that this demographic shift in potential vote preferences will have a significant impact on many of the races in the 2024 elections.