Under the Wire

Everywhere I turn, I have heard a lot about the wonder of technology. It has worked itself into our lives, like it or not. Ironically, agriculture, usually one of the last bastions to resist change, seems to have embraced it completely. GPS, I guess, now allows tractors to drive a straight row while the operator reads a magazine, at least that is what my son-in-law used to do. My tractors don’t have it and there is no place to hang a monitor on my horse. Nevertheless, I recently discovered how all this has benefitted me without me ever realizing it.

A few days ago, I discovered GPS has increased the value of our ranch headquarters. We now have doubled the amount of highway frontage we used to have. As you know, developers are always prowling around rural America looking for the next great location to build a subdivision and highway accessibility is critical. All of a sudden we’ve got miles of it and we never saw the equipment pull in. How did we find out about our new wealth?

Sue’s sister recently sent her an aerial photo of our place she found on Google or something like that. She, along with us, was surprised to find we now have a road, according to this map, running through our bull pasture. Another highway, again on this bird’s eye view, runs from our hay meadows below the house to the horse pasture above it. I saddled up to go see these thoroughfares and was very surprised to find they don’t exist.

I’m not sure what to do. Should I build an imaginary fence to keep our very real bulls off these pretend roads? Will the county start plowing snow off the meadows where the roads supposedly exist? That would uncover some good winter grazing for the cows.

One final option and I feel plumb Un-American saying it is, “Could technology be wrong? Is Google or whomever charted this, dummer than a box of rocks?” If they are, I hope they don’t read this. I have made several calls to realtors about our road side frontage now potentially for sale. It comes with lake side views, too. Between you and me, there isn’t a lake within 30 miles of us but I am depending on new technology to put one on our place soon just like the roads. Might even begin offering rafting tours on the river that may photographically cut our place in two one of these days.

Ain’t technology great?