Agriculture is one industry where we are always thinking about the future.
Politicians do it all the time, looking how policy can best fit some of the challenges which are coming down the tracks. Commentators do it a lot at conferences, building confidence in their farmer audience by pointing to the world of opportunity that awaits them next year...by 2020...by 2050. The farmers, the most important people, sit and scratch their heads and wonder when things will happen today, tomorrow or next week.
When I did an MSc at Newcastle in 2007, we did a bit of thinking about the future as well. The best bit about it was one module on 'risk' in rural areas. This largely involved sitting around drinking coffee and being pretentious and pretending that we knew everything. After we had done that bit though, we had to fast forward 10 years from that date and think about what rural areas would look like. What would be the risks? What issues would have been dealt with and how would they have changed?
We had to mock up a newspaper article and pretend that we were in 2017. I have just found it on the computer when I was looking for something else.
Of course it is ridiculous, it is meant to be to spark debate. Hopefully it is quite good fun. Take a look below (with my sincere apologies to the Guardian newspaper)
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