Are we too reliant on technology?

DEAR EDITOR

As a pedigree sheep breeder, one of the highlights of my year is attending shows in the hope of the odd rosette and to enjoy the craic with like-minded people.

In “the old days” entries were submitted by a form in the show catalogue, together with the cheque and popped in the post - simple, job done.

However, the advent of online means that many shows no longer accept paper entries or payment (what happened to cash?).

This resulted, this year, in my spending a considerable amount of time calling show secretaries due to glitches in systems.

A particular nuisance was “prompted animals’ details/tag no’s” from the previous year’s class, which is obviously from the data held and stored by the shows.

So reading the Irish Farmers Journal issue dated 7 September really made me question the increasing reliance on IT in our lives. There were various stories relating to this issue contained within the paper.

Page 5 - “Techno-stress affecting farmers” due to the burden of new technologies.

Page 8 - “Banks are impossible to deal with” with farmers saying they have to be “keyboard warriors” to enable communication with banks.

And most alarmingly, on page 2 “Energy balance numbers revealed”, which reported that agriculture is having to downscale its energy usage whilst the Dublin data centres continue their energy-guzzling expansion.

I can only conclude that current Government practices place more value on the stored data of an animal than seeing those same animals in our fields to supply food for human beings.

Something has gone terribly wrong.