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(uplifting classical orchestral music) - [Announcer] Travels & Traditions with Burt & Nicholas Wolf" is a classic travel journal, a record of their search for information about our world and how we fit into it.

They travel to the source of each story, trying to find the connections between our history and what is happening today.

What they discover can improve our lives and our understanding of the world around us.

(uplifting classical orchestral music) - [Burt] In this "Travels & Traditions" program, my son Nicholas and I set out to understand farming, how farming began thousands of years ago, what it looks like today, and where it's headed for tomorrow.

- If human history was a 24-hour clock, we've only been farming for the last five minutes.

Before then, we hunted and gathered berries, roots, nuts, whatever we could find.

We didn't stay in one place for long and we certainly didn't farm anything.

- [Burt] One of the undeniable facts of life is that no matter how much you have eaten in the past, sooner or later, you're gonna be hungry again.

- That is a beautiful dessert.

- In 2050, the global population is expected to reach 10 billion people.

Over the last 12,000 years, we have mastered the art of agriculture.

And since I haven't heard about anyone moving to Mars just yet, the challenge is feeding the world while respecting the planet's natural limits and doing it at a good price.

In the United States, farming shaped our country.

In 1862, Congress passed the Homestead Act.

You were given 160 acres as long as you farmed it for five years.

(gentle woodwind music) The law was signed by President Lincoln with the encouragement of Northern interests.

They wanted the land to be farmed by the farmers who owned it and not by plantation owners using their slaves.

If you farmed it, you kept it.

That was the deal.

These days, most farms in the United States are family owned and passed down from generation to generation.

- So Dad, where's my farm?

- Uh, I'm not quite sure you're ready for that just yet.

(gentle bluegrass music) The average farmer is 58 years old and works 12 to 18 hours a day.

They must quickly adapt to changing weather, variations in landscape, and soil quality.

With limited opportunities for experimentation, precision and consistency are the key.

(light acoustic guitar music) - To understand how farming became what it is today, I traveled to Illinois, the birthplace of modern agriculture in the United States.

Tell me a little bit about the history of why farmers moved out west.

- Well, farmers were looking for land, they were looking for opportunity, and just really to make a better life for their families.

- [Nicholas] Neil Dahlstrom is an author and archivist at John Deere, one of the world's largest agricultural companies.

He is an expert on farming history.

- There's not a lot of extant information from John Deere himself.

There's only a few letters in his own hand.

We have six or seven known photographs of John Deere during his lifetime.

We also have some miscellaneous items.

One of my favorites is John Deere's two-piece wool bathing suit, which was kept by the family and passed down over the years until it was donated to John Deere as part of our collection.

- [Nicholas] After learning that Mr.

John Deere was a modest two-piece swimsuit user, Neil explained the history of farming in our country.

- Really, farmers were looking for economic opportunity.

Land was scarce in the east and they were looking for new opportunity.

There was a financial depression in the 1830s.

They called it a panic at the time.

So even someone like John Deere, who had a successful blacksmith business, was having a hard time making ends meet.

That's why a lot of farmers moved west.

- Neil, Pizza is not the only sticky thing in the Midwest.

What was the problem that farmers had?

- Problem in the Midwest is sticky, thick soil.

- And tell me, what did John Deere do back in 1837?

- Well, John Deere heard grumblings of local farmers and he solved that problem with an innovative new steel plow.

- And that's a replica of one of them right there?

- That's right, this is a replica of that first steel plow.

It's missing its handles, but it's got a steel mold board and the soil would slide right off of that.

Farming is just an industry that constantly evolves, really from horse farming in the 19th and early 20th century to this transition to mechanization.

And oftentimes with farmers, there's these very early adopters and then folks who come along.

And this is really based on what you're growing, where you're growing it.

- [Nicholas] In the 1950s, horses still outnumbered tractors on family farms.

As technology developed, farming equipment became essential to farmers.

So this was the first horseless tractor.

- Yeah, essentially, this is a transition from horsepower to mechanical power.

So this is a 1920 Waterloo Boy Model N. Couple important features here.

First, 1920s, the first time this leaping deer trademark was added to the frame here, and that was meant to stimulate sales.

An important feature for John Deere was the use of kerosene instead of gasoline.

Kerosene was a much cheaper fuel to purchase and operate, and John Deere was worried about input costs for farmers.

- Neil, driving around the Midwest, do you see a lot of tractors out on display, they're proud to show it off?

- Yeah, tractors are a part of the family.

You don't sit down at the dinner table with your tractor, but you're probably out polishing, you're, you know, you wanna keep it running.

And when it's kind of gone beyond its useful life, oftentimes you put it in the shed, you bring it out for special occasions.

- And what makes this one behind us so special?

- [Neil] This is the iconic John Deere 4020 tractor.

It came out in 1963.

- [Nicholas] Looks just like the one I had when I was three years old to play on the carpet with.

- [Neil] Yeah, this is not quite for carpet farming, but same principle.

- [Nicholas] It's a little bigger.

- Yeah, this is bigger.

Lots of new options, two transmission styles, on-the-go shifting without clutching.

It's styled by Henry Dreyfuss and Associates.

So it's got this sleek, modern look.

It's got new safety features like the rollover protective structure.

(crickets chirping) Most farms in the United States are still family farms.

The definition of that has changed.

So they're looking to hand that over from generation to generation.

How do you provide tools and resources and education to help them do that?

What do machines look like in the future?

I'm not sure, do they get bigger or do they get smaller and there's more of 'em?

It's really exciting to think about, but really, it's about connecting machines.

It's about making machines smarter, more enabled so that we can produce more and do it in a sustainable way.

(light acoustic guitar music) - Pratt Kansas is a small town of around 7,000 people, surrounded by miles and miles of farmland.

Pratt has a movie theater, coffee shop, a bank, and most importantly, a bar where my father and the rest of the crew are probably hanging out right now.

Dad, dad, I know you're in there.

We got work to do.

(light guitar music) - Ah.

- Towns like Pratt scattered across the Midwest form a network called the Corn Belt.

The soil here is perfect for growing crops like corn, wheat, and soybean.

They literally form the backbone of the US economy.

- These rural communities, and that's what they were.

You have these small towns, you came to town to meet your neighbors, to talk about new farming practices, to maybe sell your goods.

(train bell chiming) But also a lot of those are in railroad hubs or they're on rivers or tributaries.

This is how you're moving goods and services along, right?

So you're shipping on river, you're going overland by wagon, eventually that's by train and then by automobile.

So as these towns evolve, so do the farming practices that go along with it.

But now all of a sudden, you're connected to state, and then national, and then world markets.

So we still rely on these small rural communities.

If you drive the countryside, that's where you're seeing all these crops being planted, right?

And growing during the summer and into the fall.

- So this is called See & Spray.

- [Nicholas] In Pratt, I met with Jesse Blasi.

He is a multi-generational farmer and happens to be a talented artist.

- You never know where a message of love will show up like in this case, in a massive wheat field in Kansas.

- [Nicholas] For his 20th anniversary, he used his farming skills to surprise his wife with a message by alternating two different types of wheat and going up in a plane to see it.

- I knew it'd make her smile and that was kind of the whole goal, (Sarah chuckling) was to get that little grin out of her that I like.

- That's Jesse Blasi love, that's farmer love.

(both laughing) - So how'd you get along today?

- Ah, we got the Thompson sprayed, we use liberty down there.

I think where the wind's out of the northeast, we can use something a little different up here across from Shrog's house.

- [Nicholas] Jesse and his father David have a friendly competition.

David tills the soil, he turns it over before planting.

Jesse uses no-till.

He plants straight into last year's crop.

That keeps moisture in the ground.

It also protects the soil.

- So my dad and I farm together.

I've got my land, he's got his.

I rent every acre I own.

He farms all the family ground and still operating that side of the operation.

- I'm 75, do I want... I don't know how long I'm gonna last.

I'm planning on being here.

I'm planning on for a long time yet.

But I'm comfortable with what I do.

I still, I'm kind of the backup plan.

But the no-till is gonna be the future and it's gonna be... He'll be able to do more with less labor by going the no-till route.

- Made the change to no-till and it's been really cool.

And there's a lot of farmers love to watch us do this because we farmed very similarly.

So most guys, when they made the switch, they didn't know what their farm would have looked like in the past.

Well, I can go look at his fields and know what I would've had.

You know, this is where you would've been today, had you kept doing what you're doing.

And so far, I'm happy with the way things are going.

(tractor beeping) - I think this will work for Jesse.

I think it's the new way.

It's gonna allow him to farm more acres.

But I think the big deal is just being a good steward of the ground.

(wind whipping) (wheat rustling) - No-till farming is definitely the future.

But when you stop disturbing the soil, it's like hosting an all-you-can-eat buffet for weeds.

That's where spraying comes in.

Jesse, I know I look like a farmer from my cool outfit, but I don't know much about it.

What are we spraying, what are we doing?

- So right here today, this field is wheat stubble.

It was harvested in June and we harvested it.

It's had one sprayer pass.

So there's the little green grass plants that we're seeing here today is... - [Nicholas] So the green is what we don't want.

- This is what we don't want today and this is what we're looking for.

And this is an easy weed to kill.

This is a volunteer wheat plant.

Today we're gonna be targeting plants like this, pigweed, and probably kochia.

- What's so bad about weeds?

- So right now, this wheat, what I'm really concerned about, it's using moisture out of our land, so we wanna stop that.

And the other thing is there's a few mites and aphids that can bite this.

And if this plant has a disease called mosaic, it'll just keep transferring it and we have to break the green bridge.

That'll break the lifecycle so they cannot affect our planted wheat in the fall.

- [Nicholas] In the past, spray was applied to the whole field to keep the weeds out.

It's called broadcast spraying.

The problem is that it's not great for the soil or the farmer's pocketbook.

Jesse is one of a growing number of farmers adopting new technology to address the problem.

His sprayer uses cameras and machine learning to only spray weeds and not the crops.

- So this nozzle here, if you look, there's a little bitty arrow on there.

So these here spray back at a 20-degree angle.

So this one here, we're gonna turn it over and we're gonna go from running, the two purples that were on here, we're gonna run just this tip out the back.

- [Nicholas] And that, yeah, that one's facing back instead of just directly down.

- That is correct, that is correct.

The computer needs the extra time to calculate.

- Alright, it's gonna be my first time in a sprayer.

- Well, at least it's air conditioned in there.

It'll be nice.

- That's a nice relief.

- Yeah.

(gentle country music) - Oh, and you got a nice little jumpsuit for me.

- We do, we do.

- Can ride shotgun.

(tractor beeping) (gentle country music) I feel like I'm in the cockpit of a spaceship with all this fancy technology.

What are we doing here?

- [Jesse] So the first thing we do is we go around the outside- - [Nicholas] Get our perimeter down.

- Get our perimeter done, and then we go back, and then we just go back and forth and fill in the blanks.

Everything you need to know about spraying, you learned in kindergarten.

You can just, you don't have to- - And you're not even touching the wheel right now.

- Not even the touching wheel, so we're auto steering.

We're actually running down the same tracks we ran the last time we were in the field.

We've shifted over just a little bit.

- [Nicholas] So everyone flexing they have like auto-steer car, auto-steer Tesla- - Yeah.

- [Nicholas] It was farm equipment before that.

- [Jesse] We've been doing this for 20 years, and the thing about it is we're running a signal.

We know where we're at within an inch.

- [Nicholas] Yeah, 'cause if you're overpassing, right, you're spraying it twice, you're losing money, more chemicals, it's bad for the environment.

- [Jesse] Exactly, it's like if it thinks we're like two feet north of where we are, it's gonna overlap two feet on the north side of the field and leave a two-foot skip on the south side of the field.

- [Nicholas] And if you're farming 10,000 acres, it adds up pretty quickly.

- It adds up.

we don't want any skips, so we leave the field like don't wanna come back.

So yeah, so now we're in the See & Spray mode and right now it's very, we've got it really set up sensitive.

So you can see as I'm bouncing across here, this is the only place we're spraying, okay?

- Wow, look at that.

Yeah, shutting off and on.

- [Jesse] Shutting off and on as we go.

And if it sees anything purple out there, it's gonna spray it.

Let's go ahead and we'll look at camera 1 on the- - That is awesome, watching it turn on and off.

And usually, it would just be spraying everything- - [Jesse] All the time, all the time.

So this is what it knows.

- [Nicholas] So that's the new tech, is- - This is the new tech.

Right now we're saving 51%.

So we're spraying 49% of this field.

- [Nicholas] So only half of it's actually being sprayed.

- That is correct.

- And 10 years ago, if you were doing this- - [Jesse] All of it would've been sprayed.

- [Nicholas] Sustainable agriculture focuses on farming methods that don't damage our planet and save money.

This ensures that down the road we don't run out of food.

It's simple, don't do anything that could harm the land for the next generation.

(gentle country rock music) 200 miles northwest of Pratt is a farm owned by Stefan Soloviev.

He's one of the top 20 landowners in the United States.

He owns over 600,000 acres.

No-till farming isn't always the best option, but Stefan's dry land is perfect for minimum till.

- By keeping our header this high and babying this stubble with spray, we're keeping all our moisture in the ground.

If we were plowing like everybody used to do back in the dust bowl, the moisture comes out of the ground.

If I was to dig down here after the moisture we received this summer, our sub moisture is phenomenal.

It's probably better than it's ever been right now.

We're relying specifically on the rainfall we receive.

We're not draining any aquifers and it's a perfect sustainable agriculture.

This is the western edge.

This is a very edge of farmland in the United States.

So if you see what we're doing right now is we're harvesting and we're leaving a residue on the field.

So that residue over there is what keeps the moisture in the ground.

And moisture here is very important 'cause some years we don't get much.

- Farmers think that new technology is the future of farming.

Inquiring minds want to know, but farming tech is pretty top secret.

So to be able to film at the factory behind me, I'll have to disguise myself and my crew as farmers over here.

So here's your tractor.

Okay, let's go.

(uplifting ragtime piano music) Our disguises were not very effective, but they were nice enough to show us around anyway.

(forklift whirring) (dramatic classical orchestral music) The factory used to be owned by the Department of Defense.

At its peak, it employed 19,000 people and produced 7 million ammunition cartridges a day.

Since it was during World War II, many women worked on the assembly lines since the men were away fighting.

- This boom's construction of steel.

We're working on some other technologies where we use carbon fiber.

- [Nicholas] John Schweitzer is the manager of application engineering.

He works on developing new technology that makes farming more sustainable through precision application.

- Precision application is really the applying nutrients, seed, fertilizer, herbicides in a method where it's at the right product, at the right location, the timings at the right moment, and also the rate is what we'd like to achieve.

- [Nicholas] Today at Des Moines Works, they build sprayers that use GPS, cameras, and artificial intelligence to apply nutrients and herbicides with precision.

The site covers about two and a half square kilometers, or for my American audience, the size of 450 football fields.

Sprayers are built in an assembly line.

They start off with the mainframe, they add the hoses, wiring, cabs, skid solution, booms, cameras, and finally the computers.

But there's a big difference between the farm equipment of yesterday and the machines they're building today.

- Utilizing a See & Spray system reduces the amount of herbicide applied and lessens that risk of off-target movement.

Broadcast application can lead to the herbicide moving off target.

This can happen through a number of ways.

So one, it can be drift or it can move through the water, either in runoff or leaching into the ground.

- [Nicholas] Today, the factory employs around 1,500 people and is a large part of the local economy.

John believes that the factory's Midwest location is key to its success.

By building more sustainable machines, they can help feed our growing population.

- Today we're focusing on weeds and in certain crops, those being like corn, cotton, soybeans.

In the future, we look to move to other crops like wheat.

We also have the potential to be able to identify intelligently fungus, insects in the field.

So it can move far beyond weeds and help improve the customer's economics.

(gentle uplifting music) (gentle uplifting music continues) When we're able to just spray the weeds, we limit the amount of chemicals that are used.

So it has less chance of moving off target, harming plants that aren't the weeds, whether that's outside the field or inducing stress on the crop that's being sprayed.

- [Jesse] It's better for the environment and it's better for my pocketbook.

- [Nicholas] Yeah, and it's better when you pass on the land to your next generation, it's healthier.

- Absolutely, I believe our food's healthier, I believe our plants are healthier.

This is the future, this is where we're at.

- [Nicholas] Farming for the future.

- Farming for the future.

- We sure are.

- [Jesse] Absolutely.

- [Nicholas] Farmers think long term.

Work the land today so the kids can inherit better land tomorrow.

- There's a lot of neat things going on with regenerative ag now, trying to reduce our commercial inputs, commercial fertilizers, and go to more of a natural state.

I mean, that's the goal, is to not have to put anything on.

But this soil can only produce so much, and so we're only putting on things that the soil is lacking to grow that better crop.

- [Nicholas] Sustainability makes sense to farmers.

They want their children to inherit something better.

- Every farm out here, we wanna hand it on to the next generation.

I don't know why there's some sort of longing.

You want to hand that down to the next generation.

You want it to be better than when you've got it.

- This is a calling.

When I got married and told my wife, you know, that I'm farming and ranching, I told her, "As long as I can keep the bills paid."

I never in my wildest dreams ever thought I'd be able to buy a brand new tractor.

Never thought I could ever buy a piece of ground and that I'd own 1,800 acres now.

And it's all come true.

But I wanna pass it on.

I mean, when you own a piece of land, when you have a piece of land that's feeding your family, I mean, you fall in love with this land, or I have.

I mean, it's just a dream come true.

(gentle acoustic guitar music) - [Burt] Like Nicholas, I grew up in New York City.

Farming wasn't something I thought much about.

Diners and corner delis were my favorites.

As I traveled and learned more, I began to understand how essential American farmers are.

They grow the food we eat every day and they care for the land.

There's an old saying, "We don't own the land, we borrow it from our children."

And with 10 billion people expected to share this planet by 2050, what happens on these fields matters more than ever.

Feeding the future generations will take more than machines.

It will take respect for the land and for the people who work it.

If the people we met while filming this program are any indication, we're on the right track.

- Thanks for joining us for the history and future of farming.

I hope you'll join us next time for "Travels & Traditions."

I'm Nicholas Wolf.

- [Burt] But wait, there's more.

for daily reels featuring interviews and stories filmed during "Travels & Traditions," Visit @NicholasWolfTV on Instagram or @BurtNicholasWolfTV on YouTube.

(gentle music) (gentle uplifting music) - [Announcer] "Travels & Traditions with Burt & Nicholas Wolf" is made possible by Goldbelly, shipping stone crabs, pizzas, birthday cakes, and more from many of America's iconic restaurants anywhere nationwide.

Goldbelly.com.

And by Swiss International Airlines.

Flying to over 100 worldwide locations, truly Swiss made.

Swiss International Airlines.

And by YP Foundation, helping those in need through education and improving life skills.

Guided by the principles of good deeds, charity, and public welfare.

YP Foundation.

And by Five Star Travel Inc.

in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Since 1985, Five Star Travel has been developing and delivering detailed itineraries for trips, cruises, and vacations to destinations around the world.

Five Star Travel, Inc.

(gentle acoustic guitar strums)