[OFB Cafe] Hicks and City Slickehs

[Chris Olson]

From: Fred Smith 
Sent: Saturday, July 19, 2008 1:20 AM
To: An Open Discussion Forum on Just About Everything,Especially for Techies. 
Subject: Re: [OFB Cafe] Hicks and City Slickehs


> Then you can go back
> to planting food the old fashioned way, with a mule and an iron plow.

Never underestimate the resourcefulness of the farmer.  Cyrus McCormick and John Deere invented and built their first farm implements and tractors from scratch in their own farm shops without any of the modern tooling, CAD and technology we have today.

But that's not the point.

If we didn't have the hungry mouths to feed, I wouldn't need technology like my Cat Challenger, CaseIH 2388 combine with GPS and computerized yield mapping, GPS/computer-controlled variable rate application equipment, and genetically modified hybrids.  That technology is being used to rape the planet to get higher yields to feed the hungry mouths.  It's a vicious circle that man will not win.

I was out of farming for over 20 years.  I grew up on a farm and the changes in farming over those 20 years are very alarming to me because I can see every day with my own eyes that what we're doing today can not continue for another 20 years.  And that's why we're making it a goal of our "retirement project" on our farm to be completely long-term self-sustainable and still be able to produce an excess to feed other people.  We're making it a goal to NOT be a net user of the planet's resources.  We're not there yet, but we keep "tweaking" things and I and my wife come up with new ideas every so often.

My wife, being from Sweden, is bigger into this type of thing than I ever was, because she grew up that way.  It's a facet of Swedish culture.  And it's an interesting and challenging project.  It would've been rather nice to start small and build it, but we needed to get rid of money and put it in a tax shelter so we ended up with a lot of new expensive farm equipment, that by the very virtue of being on our farm puts us in a net user of resources category.  But we don't want to run an "organic" operation with horses and one-bottom plow - our goal is to run a modern operation that's truly "green".  We might spend the rest of our lives "tweaking" things to get it that way, but we're enjoying it.
--
Chris