Hey everyone, Caroline here. Simple question, do you enjoy eating?
Of course you do, who doesn't? But have you ever really thought about where our
food comes from? Whether you like big salads or thick juicy steaks, succulent chicken wings, or
tasty pizzas; all of our food really comes from one place, farms! In fact, America's farmers are
often considered the backbone of the nation. Today, you'll get to meet one of those farmers
and learn about some of the changes in bringing your food from the fields to the table.
Mark Carrico has been involved in farming much of his life. In fact, he grew up on a small family
farm in western Kentucky. "When I was young of course, my dad, we always had a tobacco crop.
We grew tobacco. Also grew tomatoes at different points and had some livestock." In addition to
working for his father tending to their crops and animals, Mark was hired on at another nearby farm.
"Uh, then the first jobs away from that were on a dairy farm, right down the road. So I milked cows
all through high school." Through high school? Makes you wonder how old he was when he started.
"Actually, I started working on the dairy farm before I could even drive. They would
come pick me up on the weekend and work just the weekends. And that's after I got my license.
I'll start with milk cows in the morning and actually would milk before school." Mark said
he would get up at 4:30 in the morning, work a few hours, then clean up, and head to class.
The school even accommodated him and his work schedule. "When my senior year in high school,
I took study hall first period and I would come in after I get done milking cows."
Mark has obviously never been afraid of hard work; and since he enjoyed farm work, he thought about
making it a career. I knew that that might be an avenue and that's the reason I went to school
in agriculture." Mark's favorite classes throughout school were math and science courses,
including biology. Mark received his bachelor's degree in agribusiness but then "I've always been
interested in agricultural field, I just, after I got out of college, I went different directions."
After college, Mark moved to Nashville, Tennessee for a sales job. He soon returned to Western
Kentucky and worked in building supplies for several years before starting his own commercial
landscape and maintenance business. He did that for about a decade, then sold the business. "I
wasn't necessarily looking for anything specific, I just knew I was going to make a change. But the
owner of this farm knew me, and he approached me, and it just worked out." At first, Mark thought
he would drive a tractor and do whatever else needed to be done on the family farm.
Soon though, the owner came to him with something else in mind. "I am basically in charge of
the technology side of most everything on the farm. That is with the GPS
tracking systems, and the guidance systems on the equipment, all the way through
making sure the boundaries are in our computer system correctly for the farms."
So, just like almost every other aspect of our lives, technology has greatly changed farming.
"Just in the last, you know, 10 years, it's leaps and bounds." I gotta admit,
when I think of farming, I don't really think of technology. I'd like to know more. "For example,
today we have three sprayers going out to put liquid nitrogen on wheat. And in order for them
to know which farms I've loaded the farms on into each sprayer while I was sitting at my desk."
Mark implements the turns and routes that tractors and other farm equipment will take
by loading the geographic coordinates for each property into a computer. "I don't even have to
take a jump drive or anything you know, there was a time when you took the jump
drive and loaded it all in, now you just it's all wireless." So wait, wireless for farm equipment?
"I can get in a tractor with a planter and I can program within that tractor where I just push
a couple of buttons and it'll make the turns." Mark said most of the time a farm worker inside
the tractor will make the turns. But "you just click a button, it'll lock on a line, uh it'll
lower the planner, it'll go to whatever speed you want it to go to, and you just push one button."
Wow, I wonder what the driver does then? "and then you just sit back and watch.
It's pretty amazing." Mark said that manufacturers of farm equipment are getting closer and closer
to producing tractors that will completely drive themselves. "I don't know how that's
going to work out but that's what we probably said about it all, this technology, when we started."
The future may be automated tractors following computer programmed routes through fields,
but there's still plenty of manual labor to be done. Mark said one of the historic
characteristics of farming, long hours of hard work, still applies. "You have to be willing
to do about anything." Still, with a rampant increase of technology and agriculture, Mark
said that a young person interested in farming should look especially at improving his technology
skills; but not necessarily in college. "We do encourage, you know, people to go get that, you
know, the higher education. But, they definitely could come into this without having it." That
said, as farming becomes more and more high-tech each year, Mark added a college education will
likely benefit anyone in the agriculture field, and give them more diverse opportunities.
"There's a lot of different, you know, degrees you can get within the agricultural field."
Mark's childhood love of math and science courses is proving valuable in farming, where high tech
plays an increasingly important role. "You know, when I was growing up, you know a farm was a farm,
it just seemed a little different. Didn't seem to be as much of a business as it is now."
Just under 900,000 men and women across America are employed as farmers, ranchers,
and agricultural managers. Numbers that are not projected to increase in the near future.
But Mark said the industry continues to expand as the world population keeps increasing; making
farming ever more important. "There is a lot of growth. Uh you know, of course, you know, nobody
has a crystal ball to be able to tell what next year brings, but right now it's if it continues
to grow when it does what it does, there there is a lot of potential in the agricultural fields for
young people to get involved." As of 2020, the median pay for farmers and agricultural managers
was $68,090 per year according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor. That figure is for individuals who own
or manage farms and ranches and is well above the median pay of just under $42,000 for all jobs.
Still, Mark doesn't necessarily do it for the money. "To me, it's very fulfilling to know,
you know that we grow, you know the crops you know for food sources be it livestock or
for people to you know to consume. Knowing that we take a part in that and I think that you know
a lot of people would find that fulfilling." As the world population increases and there are
more mouths to feed farming becomes increasingly important. It's great to know that we have farmers
such as Mark, who with the help of technology, are helping to put food on our table every day.
Thanks, Mark for sharing your story with us and providing us with a behind-the-scenes look at the
fascinating changes taking place in agriculture.
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