My mom always said that the older you get the faster time goes.
I didn't believe her. I've come around since then.
School started after Labor Day, but the wait for the year's first break was eons into the future. For many years, that first break was opening day of pheasant season—a national holiday in our school district back in the hay day of widespread, heavy pheasant populations. Thanksgiving break was only five or six weeks later, but seemed like another light year in the distance. And I was one of the kids who liked school! I now feel kind of sorry for the kids in my class who obviously wanted nothing more than the school to burn down so no one had to share in their torture of time standing still during the longest nine months of the year.
There is another piece that needs to be added to the shuttling time element—technology. The older you get, the faster technology changes.
The changes in technology in just over 20 years are incredible. It was only about 25 years ago when the farm community was oohing and ahhing over the possibility of spraying Roundup over growing soybeans. Now it's the norm. There is an app for almost everything. And if it's not out there yet, it won't be long before someone comes up with it. It's amazing the things that technology can do, and the people who think of, create and make work the technology behind each system.
He is in his 90s now, and was one of the first friends we made after joining a church shortly after we got married, 29 years ago this summer. He farmed fruit, but was a former dairy farmer, and always a dairy farmer at heart. We still attend the same church, albeit a different one than where the friendship began. Milking robots were on his mind when we visited him last spring.
That technology was something he couldn't wrap his mind around but desperately wanted to see. He is what you'd call a true life-time learner—always reading, gets several farm magazines and still curious. A couple of postponements happened in the wait, but we finally took him to see a robotic milking set up. He was like a kid in a toy factory at Christmas time.
It really is amazing to observe a machine attach a milking unit to udders that are each different, and the "thinking process" the machine does through lasers, adjustments, mathematic calculations and whatever else is going on inside the robot and computers. He took it all in, asked hard questions, and got answers that in some cases, neither one of us understood. Before leaving his home, we promised to get him home before dark; it was 10:15 p.m. when we rolled in his yard. He enjoyed every minute and in the end, I may have been readier than him to get some sleep.
While I can't wrap my mind around the possibility of tillage equipment operating without a human operator, (how can it possibly avoid that wet hole where it's sure to get stuck if you don't look for it?) that technology as a common practice may well materialize much sooner than later. What is so incomprehensible to my generation is already common to my children. What technology will their children know?
It's a fast-changing world, folks! Put on your seatbelts, because not only is time accelerating, so too is the technology that powers our world. Stay focused and keep learning, because we are along for a very fast-moving ride!
Bev Berens is a mom to 4-H and FFA members in Michigan. Do you have a story to share? Email her at uphillfarm494@yahoo.com.