Between you and me, I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I recently watched the very cheesy, two-part sci-fi movie on Netflix called “Rebel Moon” by Zack Snyder. It’s as bad as its name suggests, with the two movies scoring 22% and 16%, respectively, on the review site Rotten Tomatoes. Skip it.

The first movie opens on an idyllic pastoral community with expansive, nutrient-rich farm fields on the moon Veldt. In the second movie, residents are threatened by a tyrannical empire that’s reliant on the moon’s food production to feed its industrialized army. To make a painfully long story shorter, with an imminent invasion, the farmers must harvest their wheat crop early.

They do so by hand.

Cue slow motion, beautifully lit vignettes of futuristic farmers with perfect skin wielding old-school wooden scythes. (As I said, don’t watch it.) Regretfully, I didn’t stop there and pushed through another hour or so of Snyder-esque melodrama. It was like watching a slow-motion car crash.

I couldn’t look away and felt my brain rotting in the process.

After the credits blessedly ran, I couldn’t get over his depiction of futuristic agriculture. In a world of spacecraft and lasers, Snyder envisions that farmers will use … hand tools?

If I had been the director, the opening scene would pan across dozens of building-sized, robotic harvesters crawling across verdant crops that stretch indefinitely into a horizon dotted by drones. Instead of sweating outside, the sci-fi farmers would monitor their AI-driven machines from high-tech command rooms.

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Maybe I’d even sprinkle in a few blaster cannon-equipped tractors and tillage implements that double as space howitzers, because food production and national security go hand in hand.

After all, people will always have to eat, and high-tech farm machines are the future, right?

Futuristic farming

If you’ve followed the ag tech space like I have this past year, you’ve probably heard that high-tech farm vehicles represent agriculture’s future. Machines driven by artificial intelligence aren’t that far away from reality. But after years of explosive growth, the technology marketplace is getting a harsh reality check.

Farm innovation is facing headwinds.

Researchers project the global ag tech marketplace will expand at a compounded annual growth rate of more than 10% over the next 10 years, reaching about $74 billion by 2034. Of course, that’s taking a bird’s-eye view. There will be pullbacks along the way, because the parallel machinery industry is intrinsically tied to the business of farming. And for now, U.S. agriculture is in a lull.

Related:John Deere rolls out autonomous tractors

So is ag tech.

In the short term, startup investment is plummeting as U.S. farmers brace for a record profit decline. Compared to 2023, a recent report from Pitchfork projects deal values to be down by more than 40%, with the number of deals done in 2024 dropping by 30%. 

But despite the downturn, innovation will continue because it must. At the end of the day, people need to eat, and agriculture must evolve to meet increasing food production demands.

Futuristic farming might not fit Snyder’s cheesy vision, but there’s no doubt in my mind that it won’t look anything like it does today. Someday, there might even be blaster-equipped tractors rolling across alien plains flush with wheat in the galaxy far, far away.

Wouldn’t that be something?