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What Old MacDonald Is REALLY Doing Down on His Farm
He’s playing with robots…EEE-I, EEE-I, OH!
Picture lush, waving fields of glittering emerald green cornstalks. Feel the heat of a sweltering Midwestern summer’s day. Take a deep breath, and inhale the distinctive, sticky-earthy-sweet-scent of corn tassels. Gaze across the miles and miles of fertile seal-brown earth and know that Old MacDonald’s farm is not far away.
Old MacDonald and his farm have always held an attraction for me. As a kid, I used to sing every word of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” yodeling as loudly as possible, the “EEE-I, EEE-I, O.” My sister and I would outdo each other with our animal imitations, clucking, mooing, neighing, quacking, oinking, and bleating in quick succession. We lived in a neighborhood, mind you, but the farms were not far away, and there was something about the story of Old MacDonald and his attendant animal friends that charmed me.
A half-century later, and I know that Old MacDonald’s Farm has not just animals, but ROBOTS!
EEEE-I, EEE-I, OH!
Now, I’m not just charmed by his farm-animal menagerie. I’m fascinated by the farmer’s open-arm welcome of the future, impacted by the robots who — like the cows and the chickens — are an integral part of what a farmer REALLY does down on the farm.
