Inaction is often the best course of action

I recently came across the Small Robot Company, a British agricultural robotics start-up. Their vision is that with smart, autonomous mini-tractors, the monoculture which has Mondrianised our landscape could be replaced by something more diverse. Farmers could plant multiple crops in the same fields, and practise new forms of rotation. Such an approach would also be sparing in its use of chemicals: rather than spraying fields indiscriminately, the robots would scuttle about like mechanical serfs, treating only areas that need it.

Though a great-uncle was a world authority on Welsh Black Mountain sheep (he once gave a long and involved answer to a child’s joke question ‘Why do white sheep eat more than black sheep?’ — not knowing that the joke answer is ‘Because there are more of them’), I know absolutely nothing about farming. But even I know there’s a thing called ploughing.

‘Don’t you need big tractors to plough things?’ I wondered aloud to the robot people.