The journey through life is filled with opportunities that can only be found by putting forth your effort to discover them. It is hard, very hard at times. You will be faced with negativity, encouragement, frustration, elation, roads with dead ends and super highways. Technological and scientific advancements will become available all along your journey as they have been in mine. I have been challenged many times in many ways. The diversity of the skills I have learned, people I have met, and appreciation for my ancestors sacrifices, make me a wealthy man. This could not of been accomplished without agriculture as my rock to launch from.
I operated tractors with iron seats and canvas windbreakers, adding machines with rows and rows of numbers and a handle to pull when you printed to tape. Computers that filled huge rooms and took stacks of punched cards or punched paper tape as a method of data input. Personal computers that had operating system with names like CPM and DOS, built by companies like Osborne, Radio Shack, and Compaq. We grew plant varieties created with natural cross breeding and hybridization methods and used a limited scope of commercial fertilizer formulations. These were all things that excited me as much in my early career as do GMO, GPS, IR Sensors, Drones, self driving equipment, drip and micro irrigation, growing condition monitors, soil microbiology, and smarter smart phones today.
Agriculture is an industry that has benefited from science and technology that was developed by industries only remotely related to growing and producing food and fiber. NASA, medical research, biochemical engineering, computer science, microbiology, and many others have made contributions which have been applied to agriculture, although not being part of the original research and development goals.
The most perplexing and frustrating challenges are still those of marketing at profitable levels and the dynamic fluctuations in climatic patterns. We have major issues in the distribution of food to many areas of the World, especially those with historical and ongoing political instability. Socio and geopolitical conditions appear to be far more challenging than the challenges that can be overcome with science and technology.
