Sam leaned in over my shoulder, blocking my view.
“This is nuts,” he said, suddenly serious, his words stacatto.
“Hey! I can’t see!” I lightly nudged him and scrolled a little further down the page.
“Damn, they are on the run…”
An internal engineer had leaked BigAg Inc.’s most secret weapon: a digitised biosphere of our interconnected ecosystems, developed through billions of dollars in R&D and the painstaking entry (if mostly automated) of even more data variables. Hailed as the answer to the ultimate wicked problem of how to feed a growing global population with rapidly degrading soil, BigAg Inc. had kept the source code closely guarded while rolling out precision agriculture hardware with generous first year discounts.
“I bet they felt finally crushed under the weight of privatisation,” Sam pried. What was the leaker's reason? We didn’t yet know, unidentified as they were. “They knew this could go further outside.”
“Well,” I said, ignoring his bait. “Let’s see how it works…”
I clicked through to the Agroecology Commons portal, where some of the more technically minded had already started to dissect the models. We waded through tables of numbers and pages of code for, well, not so long before we turned to each other with blank faces.
“Let’s leave it a few days. I don’t think we can contribute much right now,” I said.
**
We lived and worked in a small community farming sixteen acres of lush land, enveloped in the Welsh hills and grabbed during the One Planet Development rush of the early 2020s, when hordes of dispirited English escaped the silver cities to rediscover life in the soil and carrots as flavoursome as Nature intended.
Ours had been a journey from heroism to humility, guided by the folly and fortitude of experiments. We believed in deeper and we believed in better, but it turned out that we didn’t know much about anything after all, least of all the meaning of better.
We learned to still our chattering minds and to snare our focus away from blue screens to blue skies. And after several failed harvests, we started to learn to watch and listen to what the land wanted.
**
A few weeks later, a permaculture designer prototype — so much more complex than anything that had come before — had been released. The magicians had neatly wrapped up the code into something I could navigate.
“You just tell it where your patch is, and give it some preferences — your favourite foods, flowers if you like to pick them — down to colours if you’re that fussy, maybe some medicinal herbs,” I explained to the community over one of our shared meals (in Utopia, not every meal is shared). “You even tell it how much effort you’re willing to put in each week. If you’re into weeding in the frost.”
“And of course your ethics, your priorities,” Sam butted in. “If you want to be eligible for stewardship payments. If you’re bound to specific requirements as part of a land covenant. If the moon pulls are important to you.”
“And let me guess,” said Jade, one of the community founders. “You press a button and it gives you a fully sustainable land management plan that minimises effort and maximises yield.”
A brief silence was shattered by Sally’s cautious crunch on a deep-fried curried parsnip.
“Well, yes,” Sam responded. “But isn’t that incredible? Isn’t that the answer we’ve been looking for?”
And as cursory disdain surfaced around the table (but not, it should be noted, from Sally, or Paul), he continued. “Wake up! I know you’re experts in market gardening, and you’ve learned, over many years, to listen to the soil. But we — and I mean our movement — will never really be viable when the giants have this kind of tech on their side. I don’t have a clue! And most people my age don’t either! We grew up asking Google. How are our frazzled brains supposed to navigate what you’ve become to know so well? How will agroecology ever scale up when it takes decades to learn how to be effective?”
“Don’t misunderstand me,” Jade responded softly. “But forgive me if I’m somewhat cynical about a silver bullet thrown by the wayside by BigAg Inc.”
“It’s not exactly ditch, Jade,” I said. “The leak wasn’t a reject. You’ve followed the news, I’m sure. This was a genuine leak — of their top intelligence that has been rolled out over swathes of land, and is already seeing amazing results.”
“I don’t deny this is powerful,” Jade replied. “I just think we should be careful. We don’t know how the numbers have been chosen and balanced. Who decides how much tillage the land can take before the soils collapse? How much organic matter is needed before the watersheds fail? Whether and to what extent a barn owl fits into the equations? We need to remember humility, is all.”
**
And despite Jade’s hesitations, and with the perseverance of our vision, the community agreed to adopt the new tool, as a trial.
**
It couldn’t have been easier. During the delay to reach a decision, multiple new tools were released on the Agroecology Commons portal that made the transition ever painless. Now, the click of a button not only revealed optimised land management plans, but also life management plans and pension plans, all based on this new — if somewhat elusive — economics of soil.
Collectively agreeing on our preferences was our biggest challenge, something unexpected, given that we had grown to share so much. Somehow this new certainty of the end rendered the shared risk and trust found in collaboration redundant.
**
After six months of following painfully detailed instructions, our farm had transformed from a land of hope to one of glory. Our apples blushed harder, our peas became sweeter and our squashes grew more generous than ever.
And, as optimised stewardship inevitably yields ever greater returns, the following harvest yielded even bigger and sweeter. And the community came to trust that, so long as we stuck to the plans (even when we didn’t understand them), our land couldn’t fail.
**
And over this time, more and more people around the world had turned to growing their own food, kindly to the extent that they set their value parameters. The fog of complexity had been lifted. Ever new tools were released, enabling the least technically gifted to make use of the leaked digitised biosphere. There was a tool for all shapes and sizes: window sills, urban green walls, allotments, city parks and industrialised farms.
**
“And in today’s headlines, BigAg Inc. has successfully won its long standing legal battle against the City of London, whose park department was indisputably found to have illegally used land management plans derived from the Digital Biosphere leaked last year.”
“Hey!” Sam called, “Turn that up!”
The broadcaster continued as we rushed to gather round. “It is well known that the leaked Digital Biosphere has informed multiple new tools and technologies, for a wide range of uses, with uncountable beneficiaries. It is understood that BigAg Inc. is clamping down on illegal use by large players to make an example.”
“In a statement from BigAg Inc., its Head of Sustainability said, This is a landmark decision that brings some justice to an unprecedented scale of theft. In these challenging times, the rule of law must be upheld. Our business has suffered huge losses of market share as a result of the leak. But beyond our business, the leak has caused a significant step backwards in the development of a sustainable global food system, having undermined the ongoing level of investment needed to continually improve the Digital Biosphere to deliver automated food sustainability in a responsible way.”
“What is she on about?” Sam cried. “That leak has been amazing for food sovereignty.”
“Well, not really sovereignty,” Jade responded. “We’re not exactly making the decisions. And she has a point, that they’ve lost further investment to make it more intelligent. There’ll be a big hole of data in there somewhere, which we won’t know about until it’s too late.”
“Do you think we’ll be okay? They’ll hardly come after us — we’re just an insignificant farm, right?” Sally asked.
**
And in the months that followed, as further municipalities, development agencies, multinational food producers and tech companies around the world were prosecuted, they didn’t come after us. Nor did they come to our neighbours, or to the Agroecology Commons portal.
**
And this is what happened next.
**
Things changed just as we had got used to being left alone.
**
“It won’t let me in!” Sam said, clicking frantically as he tried to open the farm management plan one day. “Shit. It says our account has been suspended due to illegal activity. I don’t know if this is some virus or trojan or…”
“How can our account be suspended? Didn’t we set this up through the blockchain?”
“Yeah,” Sam replied, “It has nothing to do with BigAg Inc.”
We weren’t the only ones. Overnight, the Agroecology Commons portal had been plastered with fraught posts telling the same story. And, a week later, the fine-or-court letters started coming.
Whether the fines were ever pursued is another story, but BigAg Inc. was able to recoup some of their lost income, which they promptly reinvested into making the machine truly tamperproof and ever more intelligent. And this time, they remembered the barn owls.
And this time, they monopolised the land.
**
An alternative ending
**
And this is what happened next.
**
Despite the lack of investment, the years passed, yielding ever better harvests as the soil started to benefit from better stewardship of the land.
And, as the years passed, the system’s holes began to appear.
A story was shared from a had-been coastal enterprise that hadn’t quite understood how it depended on puffins. And another from a city farm that hadn’t grasped the importance of glow-worms.
And as the holes became bigger — the size of whole water catchments, people began to realise the cost of relying on models.
But, by this time, people had long forgotten how to listen to the land.
**
An alternative ending (2)
**
And this is what happened next.
**
And while BigAg Inc.’s investment ceased, new intelligence was instead harnessed by the global community. Through various decentralised nodes, the commons created new shapes of knowledge, training the models in new ways according to unique cultural and experiential perspectives.
And, over time, there was an eruption in the diversity of knowledge and experience. And, over time, the meaning of truth lost its universal definition, and people no longer knew which knowledge they could trust.
Some truths were incompatible. Others were explicit contradictions. And, with no system of assurance, people began to distrust in the model(s) and instead held onto the stories of their neighbours.
The dominos fell. People disconnected from the web and sought roots instead.
**
An alternative ending (3)
**
And this is what happened next.
**
BigAg Inc. stopped their witch hunt and evolved their business model, realising that a three-dimensional value proposition was found through a philanthropic reputation (and, the monopoly of philanthropy).
And the people ate, and the barn owls thrived, and shareholders enjoyed healthy returns on their investment.
Until one day.
**
So which ending happened, Reader?
The truth is, none — and all — in no order in particular.
(And, if you’re curious, the leaker was never discovered. Or, at least, not publicly).