Trump Gets Made Fun of for 'Tractor' Comment, But It's Something Farmers Have Needed for Years
Liberals have once again utterly humiliated themselves on a subject they know virtually nothing about. And no, I’m not talking about the Second Amendment.
I’m talking about farming and the dire importance of providing cutting-edge technology to America’s farmers and rural areas in general.
On Wednesday, Vox associate editor Aaron Rupar thought he successfully dunked on President Donald Trump after the president — who was speaking to Iowa farmers — repeated the call for increased broadband technology for Midwest farmers.
“Beyond parody — Fox Business cuts away from Trump’s speech right after he laments, bizarrely, that tractors can’t hook up to the internet,” Rupar tweeted.
Beyond parody — Fox Business cuts away from Trump’s speech right after he laments, bizarrely, that tractors can’t hook up to the internet pic.twitter.com/hbYoYm2UgO
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 11, 2019
Today’s farming equipment, which is something I’m guessing Mr. Rupar has never laid eyes on short of a video game or movie, is nothing less than stunningly high-tech and quite frankly, amazing.
Why? Because technology can provide farmers with accurate, real-time information concerning their equipment, fields, crop yields and other metrics that help feed people across the United States.
Not long after Rupar’s tweet, Andy Lassner, producer of the “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” chimed in and essentially agreed with Rupar’s assessment in a tweet that simply read, “This is something.”
This is something https://t.co/pvrkqHVSg4
— andy lassner (@andylassner) June 11, 2019
What’s really “something” is that Lassner is so out of touch with reality concerning the production of food in America and the role technology plays in it that he thought he scored with his unoriginal tweet.
And of course, MSNBC personality Joy Reid added to the conversation by retweeting Rupar and adding a “thinking emoji.”
— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) June 11, 2019
Even better, as evidenced in replies to Reid’s emoji response, were people gently reminding Reid that yes, tractors do use GPS and other technologies to help increase crop yields and boost farming efficiency.
The point that Rupar, Lassner and Reid were missing wasn’t that Trump was complaining that tractors can’t hook up to the internet, but that rural farm areas do not have the broadband coverage needed in order to use the technology.
As reported by ZDNet, American farming icon John Deere recently acquired a Silicon Valley-based startup called Blue River, which will help them implement machine learning, robotics and deep learning into the brains of their farming equipment.
That kind of tech is said to be “key” to helping farmers double and triple food production, which is a matter of life and death, given the projected increase in food demand over the next thirty years.
Terry Pickett, manager of advanced engineering for John Deere’s Intelligent Solutions Group, said that nine billion people are expected to inhabit Earth by 2050.
“And to feed those people, there’s different estimates out there, but we probably need to increase current production by 70 percent. That’s not very long away when you look at the number of years it takes to develop the type of equipment and technology we need. It’s a real race,” Pickett explained.
As you can see, this is serious stuff. And President Trump is right to advocate for greater tech coverage in rural America.
As a Midwesterner who comes from a long line of farmers, I was admittedly taken aback by Rupar’s criticism of Trump’s request for increased broadband access for farming areas. I suppose I didn’t realize that so many people were so uninformed. Hopefully, that changes.
While liberals like Rupar and his friends think broadband technology is nothing more than a fast way to download the latest Taylor Swift album, the rest of the country knows better.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
