INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY In collaboration with TUESDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2014 Copyright © 2014 The New York Times Farmers Resort To Data To Thrive By QUENTIN HARDY LEESBURG, Indiana — Kip Tom, a seventh-generation family farmer, harvests the staples of modern agriculture: seed corn, feed corn, soybeans and data. “I’m hooked on a drug of information and productivity,” he said, sitting in an office filled with computer screens and a whiteboard covered with plans for his farm’s computer network. Mr. Tom, 59, is as much a chief technology officer as he is a farmer. Where his great-great-grandfather hitched a mule, “we’ve got sensors on the combine, GPS data from satellites, cellular modems on self-driving tractors, apps for irrigation on iPhones,” he said. The demise of the small family farm has been a long time coming. But for farmers like Mr. Tom, technology offers a lifeline, a way to navigate the boom-and-bust cycles of making a living from the land. It is also helping some of them compete with giant agribusinesses. Mr. Tom’s farm is expanding, to 8,100 hectares today from 280 hectares in the 1970s. But some of his neighbors’ farms are fading away. Such costly technology is beyond the means of the smallest farmers. Equipment makers have covered their planters, tractors and harvesters with sensors, computers and communications equipment. A combine equipped to harvest a few crops cost perhaps $65,000 in 2000; now it goes for as much as $500,000 because of the added information technology. “We’ve seen a big uptick in the productivity of larger farms,” Continued on Page 2 KUNI TAKAHASHI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES A mother in Haryana, where almost every baby born in hospitals in recent years has been injected with antibiotics. ‘Superbugs’ Spread Around Globe Babies Die by the Thousands as India Battles Drug-Resistant Bacteria By GARDINER HARRIS AMRAVATI, India — A deadly epidemic that could have global implications is sweeping India, killing tens of thousands of infants who are born with bacterial infections that are resistant to most known antibiotics. More than 58,000 died last year. India’s resistant infections have already begun to migrate elsewhere. Researchers have found “superbugs” carrying a genetic code first identified in India — NDM1 (or New Delhi metallo-beta lactamase 1) — around the world, including in France, Japan, Oman and the United States. Health officials have warned for decades that overuse of antibiotics would eventually lead bacteria to evolve in a way that made the drugs useless. India and other developing nations are not the only offenders. Overuse of the drugs in livestock farms in the United States has led to the rise of resistant strains there, and research has shown that as much as half of antibiotic prescriptions in the United States are unnecessary. In the United States, two million people are sickened by resistant bacteria every year and 23,000 die as a result. In the European Union, the death toll is similar, 25,000 a year. But efforts to crack down on inappropriate antibiotic use in the United States and much of Europe have been successful, with prescriptions dropping between 2000 and 2010. That drop was more than offset, however, by growing use in the developing world. Global sales of antibiotics for human consumption rose 36 percent from 2000 to 2010, with Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa accounting for 76 percent of that increase. A growing chorus of researchers say the evidence is now overwhelming that a significant share of the bacteria present in India — in its water, sewage, animals, soil and even its mothers — is immune to nearly all antibiotics. And it is not only newborns who are affected. Uppalapu Shrinivas, one of India’s most famous musicians, died September 19 at age 45 because of an infection that Continued on Page 3 INTELLIGENCE WORLD TRENDS MONEY & BUSINESS ARTS & DESIGN Japan and China lower the tension. PAGE 2 An artist inspired by a prison cell. PAGE 4 Moscow’s financial hub sits empty. PAGE 8 Club scene thrives in Berlin’s ruins. PAGE 12