CLAYTON RYE
Last week we had two notable events around here.
One event is that it still does not want to rain. It is a subject many people have spent much time talking about and there is nothing that I can add to what has already been said.
I was thinking about listing the upside of a lack of rain such as your car staying cleaner longer, cutting hay in the morning and baling it in the afternoon, the lack of mosquitoes or less lawn mowing, but the dry conditions we have now are not funny. With the exception of Florida, everyone is looking toward the sky for any sign of approaching storm clouds.
It is good to see $6 corn in the market, something that I would have bet against not that many months ago. I would like to make more sales of new crop corn and soybeans at these prices but first I want to know what size of a crop I am going to have. In the meantime, the grain market keeps climbing.
What was the other notable event of last week around here? I saw two Caterpillars, one pulling the other by a steel cable, drive in the ditch alongside my gravel road installing a fiber optic cable much like a tile plow installs drainage tile.
They stopped long enough to put on a new spool of fiber optic cable while they made the connections to my residence. I learned later in the day it would be a year before everything was operational and then we would be getting telephone, Internet and cable television if we want it on the fiber optic cable.
I live in about as rural a part of my state as there is. I am located about five miles from the closest of three towns with all three towns having population of 200 each. Ten miles away is the next biggest town of 8,000.
I know fiber optic cable is a technological advance, but how much I am not exactly sure.
We watch television using a satellite dish and on Thursday nights before the news, we watch reruns of “Frasier” because there is not much else on. Do I need fiber optic cable to watch “Frasier” reruns? I do not think so.
When our Internet connection gives us trouble, we learn how much we depend on it for almost everything. Not having an Internet connection is as serious as a flat tire on a car or a tractor. It needs to be fixed now.
Our Internet provides us with messages, information, like everyone else – plus it will be the way we will receive books, magazines, newspapers, music, radio, television and movies in the future.
We will keep our regular telephone connection as it provides an answering machine which is a way to not talk to people unless we want to talk to them. Our regular phone also gives us a way to call our cell phone so we can locate it by its ringing.
That is all I know about fiber optic cable. Somewhere there are people who have an idea for the next step that will make things more convenient and faster.
Whatever it is, it will be something that is new to us and after using it for a while we will wonder how we ever got along without it.
Maybe they will make those “Frasier” reruns more watchable. Naaah, even technology has its limits.
Rye is a Farm News staff writer and farmer from Hanlontown. Reach him by e-mail at crye@wctatel.net.