The original call
Original year: 2011
2026 assessment
Scorecard verdict: Hit
Hit. The decade that followed brought GPS-guided and self-steering equipment into the mainstream, put sensors on animals and in soil, and made data the central nervous system of the modern operation. The generational point landed too. By the late 2010s the “iPod generation” really was returning to the family farm and pulling new tools in with them. The speed of change in agriculture between 2011 and 2021 dwarfed the previous fifty years, exactly as called.