In Christopher Nolan’s film, Interstellar, a previous astronaut is now a high-tech production farmer. His farm appears like the farms of today with subtle modifications. The film’s future requires that Cooper make a lot of modifications to his operation in order to make his farm operate like today’s farms. He has equipped his tractors to be autonomous, he hunts down drones that come over his field for parts, he is very in tune with the environmental requirements for his farm to grow.
The future of farming will require more technical precision and knowledge on a systems scale. Producing food to feed large groups of people is a systems challenge at its core. Cooper’s future farm shows the resiliency of farmers described in Inwood’s essay above.
