Still, he too had a few hours to sit inside, watch his fields soak, and sum up the roller coaster ride he's been living since he took over his father's farm two decades back. Every business has its uncertainities, Harford says, but farming is extreme. People in the cities read about the major droughts and floods, but the unpredictability runs into every corner of the enterprise. The same inputs will not produce the same output from one year to the next, nor do any two acres on a farm grow the same yield on the same year, let alone two acres from different farms. No two situations are ever equal.
Agriculture is mostly experiences.
This unpredictability defines farming culture, making farmers conservative, skeptical, and careful. It also makes farming management more of an art than a science. Other businesses can calculate the tradeoffs between marginal returns and incremental resource costs quantitatively, objectively. A farmer considering whether an extra hour of field inspection makes sense on a given acre must account for the effect of changes in soil type, seed variety, field and planting geometry, tillage practices, yield histories, drainage, pest populations, density of organic material, and so on, all of which can fluctuate wildly across a single field. Rationalizing these variables into hard numbers would require massive amounts of measurement.