Crop FarmerTypical Day

Uncle Jed rises with his chickens (which he has named "dinner Tuesday," "dinner Wednesday," and so forth - named after his grandparents, ironically enough) at 5 a.m. and gets dressed, careful not to wake the little wifey. The family has a pet pig named Chops who they will also eat some day with apple sauce made from the fruit of their apple tree. Uncle Jed tends to the animals - makes sure that they have food and water and togetherness. He likes plump meat. He loves having lots of animals on the farm because they make his job easier. Why? Because they produce... fertilizer. When he runs low, he finds 3-day-old Indonesian food and he's back to full stores.

After breakfast and as soon as there is light, Jed heads out into the fields to see how the crops are doing. He checks for color, clarity, stiffness, a dozen other little things - but mainly the buds. If the plants are budding, good things will happen in the spring. Along the way, Jed has learned to fly (he had to take about 80 hours to learn to fly a crop-duster airplane and dust his crops – and his neighbors’ crops… for a small fee).  So now he's a pilot.  And he makes the Dusting Run every 48 hours in good weather to keep away the locusts, aphids, and other Pharaoh-worthy bugs. Once he has finished throwing up from the sharp turns and smell of rotted chicken crap, he checks to make sure the irrigation wells are functioning properly, which frankly doesn't do much to quell his feeling of nausea, and then spends some time moving aluminum piping to water new parts of the field.

^{Ce n’est pas les pipes.}

As he picks his way through the fields, he also picks bugs off his crops by hand. After having completed his Dusting Run, there is really no other way to get rid of any residual hangers-on. He can't do an aphid mating call to lure them all into a trap, and the other kind of crop dusting doesn't seem to affect them. It's tedious, unrewarding work, but it has to be done. No wonder they call these guys bugs.