Look, up in the sky. It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No. It’s a farm vehicle.
When I was a boy, we pictured farmers as, well to put it bluntly, backward. We even had an expression for somebody who was not too savvy, saying that they had just fallen off the turnip truck. We pictured farms with a duck duck here and a duck duck there, singing E-I-E-I-O.
Fast forward to today, and that UFO you see in the sky might just be a farmer surveying his crops in his new electric Vertical Take-off and Landing vehicle, eVTOL, for short. Things sure have changed.
One hundred years ago there were 6.5 million farms in the United States. 32,000,000 Americans lived on a farm. At that time it was 30 percent of the population. Today less than 2 percent of the U.S. population make their living as farmers. Small farms are going out of business. Today, we are down to about 2 million farms in the United States, but they produce more than the 6.5 million farms in days of yore.
Farms have gotten larger as big corporations have gobbled up many of the small farms, and high-tech has taken over. Only the Amish still use horses to plow their fields. Today’s tractors come with air-conditioned cabins, auto steering and GPS navigation. They also come with huge repair bills when they break down. No longer can a farmer just tow a broken tractor into the barn and fix it themselves. In some cases, they are prohibited from doing this by the manufacturer, and in other cases they’re just not that easy to fix. Today, paying manufacturers for tractor repair is quite expensive. So many farmers are fighting for laws that give them the right to repair their own vehicles.
Most farmers are technically millionaires. They are worth a lot on paper, but, in reality, have trouble making ends meet, because most of their money is tied-up in land and equipment. Now, just to stay competitive, some of them are investing in electric Vertical Take Off and Landing vehicles to monitor their crops and livestock. Instead of singing E-I-E-I-O, they are singing “Off we go into the wild blue yonder.” It reminds me of the old TV program Sky King, who needed an airplane to keep an eye on his farm.
So, the next time you’re sitting down at the table enjoying a delicious spread of food, take a moment to thank a farmer. Buy locally grown food, if possible…and be sure to eat your vegetables.
Peace and Love, and all of the above,
Earl
earlthepearl137 