Farming off the hook

 A dusting of white covers the land he farmed like his father before him. Well-used machinery lies scattered about, doubtful to be used again. Some he remembered as a child, like riding on the tractor and the scent of a hard day's work coming off his dad's shirt, he had hung to dry on the tractor's door before getting home to his bride.

The hay baler and the combine were all useful in their day, but now they are just rusted monsters sinking deeper into the ground with every violent storm.

It's sometimes hard to accept change, but it's going to happen whether you like it or not. He barely swallowed a sip of iced tea when he was buzzed by a drone his son was using to calculate the acres he would plant this year, then he'd feed all the data into a computer and come up with a foolproof game plan. There was a machine for everything, but not the kind he used; those were relics people collected and restored in their garages and entered in the farm parade.

His wife of sixty years would sometimes join him, sitting on the porch waiting for their son to bring out the next machine, and he never disappointed. A hovercraft floated above the rows, dropping seeds at a precise moment, controlled by an app from his tablet strapped to his arm A remote-controlled wagon with robotic hooks grabbed the bales of hay, setting them into a huge wagon that, once full, would be sent to the mill a mile down the road, guided by lasers with no need for a human at all.

Would you look at that? She would say, "Looks like the apple didn't fall far from the tree, did it?"He just shrugged his shoulders and got up, heading for the barn where he was restoring a classic John Deere tractor, which he was certain had a good chance at the farm parade.

His son came into the barn asking if he had seen the most recent tool he had ordered, a drone the size of a midsize truck that would become a patrolling kill machine, ridding the farm of poachers, both animal and human. Just don't kill one of us, he said to his son, who was prepping the drone for its first mission that night. They sat on the porch looking at the screen of his tablet, searching for intruders who would be met with rapid bursts of fire and destroyed in seconds. But with rubber bullets.

Farming had become a game he no longer cared to play. But the result was more crops, less work, and huge harvests, all for the cost of a few machines. He admitted he feared a little. At the farm parade, a few young nerds with coke bottle glasses decided to do a flyover to aggravate the old timers, and when a drone the size of a midsize truck buzzed him, he reached for his Smith and Wesson Bulldog and blew a hole into it the size of a Volkswagen.

She bailed him out of jail, and she joined him on the John Deere tractor for the slow ride back to their farm. Along the way, crowds of onlookers clapped their hands and shouted words of encouragement. The sweat from his shirt drying on the tractor door was just one more memory of time going by too fast.

He helped his son fix the drone, and, as time would have it, he began to understand his son's futuristic farming methods, even if he didn't like them. More and more farmers adapted and discovered the benefits of farming in the future, but he would leave it all up to his son now as he finished the John Deere that, by the way, took the blue ribbon at the state fair.

Mike 2025