Schumpeter: Digital Disruption on the Farm | The Economist →

It is always good to see real-world examples of technology shocks. Here are some key excerpts from this article:

Farmers can be among the most hidebound of managers, so it is no surprise that they are nervous about a new idea called prescriptive planting, which is set to disrupt their business. In essence, it is a system that tells them with great precision which seeds to plant and how to cultivate them in each patch of land. …

Prescriptive planting is catching on fast. …

The benefits are clear. Farmers who have tried Monsanto’s system say it has pushed up yields by roughly 5% over two years, a feat no other single intervention could match. The seed companies think providing more data to farmers could increase America’s maize yield from 160 bushels an acre (10 tonnes a hectare) to 200 bushels—giving a terrific boost to growers’ meagre margins. …

Farmers might be expected to have mixed feelings about the technology anyway: although it boosts yields, it reduces the role of discretion and skill in farming—their core competence. However, the bigger problem is that farmers distrust the companies peddling this new method. They fear that the stream of detailed data they are providing on their harvests might be misused. Their commercial secrets could be sold, or leak to rival farmers; the prescriptive-planting firms might even use the data to buy underperforming farms and run them in competition with the farmers; or the companies could use the highly sensitive data on harvests to trade on the commodity markets, to the detriment of farmers who sell into those markets.

I view aggregate technology shocks as primarily representing the steep part of an S-shaped adoption curve for a technology. As such, most aggregate technology shocks should be predictable in advance if the natural logarithms of [(market share/ (1 - market share)]  for promising techniques are graphed against time. (Such graphs are something Clay Christensen and coauthors recommend to predict the future course of disruptive innovations. Watch for my post on Clay Christensen, tomorrow morning, at half-past midnight EDT.)