This week, it finally happened. After months of waiting, my new tractor was delivered. I’ll admit it honestly: a machine like this doesn’t really fit someone who believes in permaculture.

Permaculture is all about disturbing the soil as little as possible. Healthy soil is alive. Billions of fungi, bacteria, insects and roots form an underground network through which water, oxygen and nutrients circulate. Every time heavy machinery drives across the land, that living world is compressed a little further. The soil becomes denser, rainwater infiltrates less easily, and roots have less space to grow.

So yes, buying a tractor weighing nearly two tonnes may not have been the most obvious decision. But I’m also seventy-three. Working the land is physically demanding for a writer who has spent most of his life behind a desk. And, like so many men, I still have a weakness for boytoys.

As far as I know, this is the first fully electric tractor on Mallorca. The first time I drove it between my vines, something struck me that I hadn’t expected at all. Almost nothing happened. No diesel engine. No exhaust fumes. No vibrations. Just the quiet hum of the cooling system and the tires rolling over the farm tracks where I’m allowed to drive.

That silence made me realize something. I hadn’t simply bought another tractor. I had bought a building block of a new farming system.

An electric tractor immediately raises new questions. Where will the electricity come from? Do I have enough solar panels? Will my home battery be large enough? Can my Renault 5 become part of the same energy system? Could the irrigation pumps run on that energy as well?

One technological change quietly pulls on ten other threads. That is how real system change begins. Not because governments announce a grand revolution. Not because people suddenly become environmentally conscious overnight. But because one practical improvement slowly changes the logic behind dozens of other decisions.

Looking back from the year 2125, many historians will probably argue that agriculture was transformed by artificial intelligence, robotics or genetic engineering. I think they’ll be wrong. The real revolution began the moment farmers stopped buying fuel and started harvesting energy.

From that moment on, everything changed. Machines became almost silent. The air became cleaner. Operating costs fell. Farms produced not only food, but electricity as well. The soil became richer every year instead of poorer. Farmers were no longer just food producers; they became stewards of biodiversity, water and energy.

The tractor was simply the first machine that connected my farm directly to the sun.

A hundred years from now, nobody will remember when the last diesel tractor disappeared, just as nobody remembers when the last steam locomotive was taken out of service. History rarely remembers the end of an era. It remembers the moment a new one quietly began.

Perhaps that moment was yesterday, when I drove silently between my vines and my neighbour looked up in surprise because, for the first time, he hadn’t heard me coming.

Back From The Future is a series in which I look back from the year 2125 at the choices we are making today.