Farmers ready for the final frontier
At the moment, land is commanding 10,000 an acre. Which, to my mind, is about 9,500 an acre more than it should be commanding.
How can farmers like me, biting at the bit to expand, drive on in such a circumstance? It’s a deeply frustrating situation.
Anyhow, in an effort to deal with the crisis, and secure land at a more reasonable rate, instead of keeping my ear to the ground, for many years my eyes have been firmly focused on the stars.
With land prices already out of this world, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that we should be looking to other worlds in an effort to find good grazing ground.
For a long time now, Mars has been my number one choice. It’s not too far from home, and there could well be water on Mars, if you dig deep enough. There are, of course, a few outcrops of rock here and there on the red planet, but nothing a good back-actor and a few able-bodied farmers wouldn’t sort out in about three weeks.
Mars is where hard-working fellows like us should be headed. It has the land, and we have the ambition.
But, alas, there seems to be little action with regards to flying to Mars, only talk. If talk could fly us to Mars, we’d be all there at this stage, milking Martian cows and sowing crops, with out-of-this-world yields.
Instead, right now, instead of blasting off to Mars, NASA is conducting a pointless experiment out in the wilds of Hawaii.
It’s nicknamed the ‘isolation experiment,’ with six astronauts being marooned there for the next year.
It’s an effort to see how they will cope with the isolation of being up there in Mars.
I have never heard of such baloney. I cannot figure out how it can be called an ‘isolation experiment’, when there are six people involved. Damn it all, ’tis the crowded ‘isolation experiment’.
And to think they had to whisk six astronauts out to Hawaii for the year to see what impact isolation would have on them, at a cost of millions I’m sure, when all they had to do was call out here to rural Ireland for a day or two, and we could supply them with all the isolation information they desired.
In my time, I have gone for days, if not weeks, without seeing a solitary soul. Robinson Crusoe sometimes had more company than I did.
Indeed, since Shoteen was forced to pack in his local taxi service, my isolation has become all the worse, as my voyages to Seano’s bar in Kilmurry have become about as rare as a solar eclipse. And NASA are trying to grasp isolation by shoving six people out to Hawaii! Give me a break.
Us Irish rural inhabitants know all about isolation. With the closure of the rural post office and Garda barracks, with the pathetic mobile and broadband reception that we have to endure, never mind the craters of potholes on our roads, sure ’tis like Mars out here already.
NASA should call a halt to their ridiculous ‘isolation experiment’ in Hawaii, and send a team out here to rural Ireland to real isolation, where they would learn more in five minutes about being forgotten than they could learn in a year of high living in Hawaii.
