The Slow Advance of "Better"

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/drone-didis-taking-flight-bill-gates-b1okc/

Long ago (1975 or thereabouts) I remember journeying to South Dakota for a job interview for a job I ultimately took. There were airplanes above fields of sunflowers grown for their oil. The planes were dusting the crops (sunflowers and other crops) with insecticides and plant foods-- slow, low and dangerous flights utilizing expensive capital equipment (single engine, high-wing aircraft especially equipped with crop-dusting gear), and requiring highly skilled, expensive labor, that is airplane pilots also trained in crop dusting.

The above URL tells of "drone sisters" in India, lo these many years later, doing the same thing cheaply and efficiently using especially configured drones. Flying drones from the ground, rendering farmer's efforts much more productive, these folks are examples of the sort of better ways that evolve as technology makes new techniques available for doing what is already "known good" and well-established. It does not take an inventor to come up with crop dusting using drones. It takes mere entrepreneurship-- working out the details, and successfully offering services, funded by simple capital investment, perhaps in certain cases aided by government funding.

It was difficult to envision and predict when (if ever) better, easier, cheaper, safer crop dusting might have come to pass. It is impossible to predict specific results of cheaper more productive food production in the wide world. But putting drones to work in this way has made (is making) small but hugely significant impacts in things like infant mortality, and the productivity of the quotidian, ancient hard work of farming our food.

God bless the drone sisters, all over the world. And God bless us, every one.