Agricultural Futurism

Probably toward the top of things that often evade the imagination of the average user of Midjourney, who is probably more interested in coming up with a prompt to imagine their Hot Cyberpunk Girlfriend, is the idea of futuristic agricultural scenery. Why? No one cares about agriculture in 2023. Why would they care about it in 2523? Or, more specifically for our purposes here, if people don’t think much about agriculture in the modern day, why would they imagine what it might look like in the future? I certainly spend ever more time thinking about this after studying agriculture in college, being smack dab in the middle of the prairie in Grinnell, Iowa– and I have to say that I think I probably got way more perspective on the world from this than I would have been afforded at a school in an urban setting where this is completely off the radar.

The following images were part of a series of hundreds of prompts I tried out to create storyboard images for a thing I was working on that involved agriculture in a science fiction setting. I wanted to reimagine the classical idea of the combine harvester or tractor by imagining machinery that mimics insectoid forms– bulbous beetles harvesting grain, instead of chunky automobile-type machines.