Keeping Farmers Young

 I don’t know about your kids, but I’m sure they’re not a whole lot different from mine. I’ve got two teenage girls (and yes, I will accept sympathy cards) but if you’re around them, it sounds like an old pinball arcade. Phones dinging, text message alerts, twittering signals, computers running non-stop with Facebook, YouTube and My Space…it’s a different world. One of the most common complaints you hear from farmers and ag people in general is that farmers are getting old and the kids don’t want to take over because it’s too boring.

 Here’s a thought. Bring in all this high tech wizardry and accomplish a number of goals…get more information relevant to operating your spread, reduce costs, increase yields…and, most importantly…well I’ll let high tech farmer Robert Blair tell ya’: “Little brother came home on leave from the military, got in the tractor for the first time, sitting in the cab talking to me, I flipped the auto-steer over, and I’m skipping every other pass seeding…Wow, that’s cool, I can’t wait to get in there and do this. They’re fascinated by it. They’re learning it right now in schools, what computers can do. They’re growing up with it. Computers to them are what pen and paper were to us.”

 Imagine that…it’s cool to be a farmer and I’m gonna follow in Dad’s footsteps…of course with an I-Pod, I-phone and laptop in the cab.