A visit to the battlefields of soy

Valley Springs, S.D.

‘I’m farming dirty!” says Kevin Scott, a father of six with one of those delightful Marge Gunderson Upper Midwestern tundra accents, who out here in his little house on the prairie right down the road from that little house on the prairie — the one Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about — is living the simple farmer’s life, which in the early 21st century includes such combat-derived technologies as surveillance drones and satellite overheads, along with giant tractors decked out with multiple touch-screen arrays into which are pumped vast quantities of real-time corn-and-soybean-related data of various kinds, and sensors …