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To Plow with Sound. Nostalgists still mourn for the days when most farm chores were handled by horses instead of horsepower, by men instead of machines. As Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman recently noted, they fear that the trend toward automation "will excise the soul from farming, destroy its joy, dull its satisfactions and chill the ageless intimacy between man and his land." This view notwithstanding, most farmers welcome machine-age relief from what Dr. Joseph Ackerman, managing director of Chicago's Farm Foundation, calls "farming by hunch and the Farmer's Almanac."
The day is approaching—"closer than you think," says Deere's Research and Development Chief Gordon Millar—when farmers will cultivate the soil with inaudible sound waves, work fields by computer-controlled programs, use television to monitor their remote-con trolled machines. Another phenomenon in the not too distant future is square tomatoes, which, after all, could be more easily packaged by machine—and fit better in sandwiches.