I’m rapidly becoming a grumpy old man. OK, so that’s only partly true. I’m not rapidly getting old. That takes time. I am, however, rapidly getting grouchier.

Normally, I am a very happy, easy going guy. One single thing turns the smiles into frowns at the drop of a hat. The culprit? Progress. That’s right. I do not like progress. It makes me grouchy. This does not seem to be a popular point of view. I have arrived at that conclusion because nearly everyone wants to argue with me about it. They can argue all they want. Nobody is going to change my mind. Progress makes me grumpy. One reason I’m so adamant about my opposition to change is everybody gives me the same weak argument in favor of it, then later, they admit to opposing parts of progress themselves.

When I get into philosophical discussions concerning the value of progress, these enlightened folk always mention Dr. Jonas Saulk, who discovered a vaccine for polio, that extended life expectancy of our society and the George Foreman Grill. OK, it’s actually electricity they mention but I know they’re really talking about the convenience of the lean mean grilling machine. Call me insensitive, but I’m not impressed. Maybe I just don’t think on a grand enough scale. Instead of thinking of all the little sugar cubes soaked with polio vaccine we ate as kids, I’m much more pragmatic. How does progress make my life better right now? To me it’s a simple fact. Old things work. New things don’t.

One morning one of our cows went through the timeless act of having a calf. Since there has been no progress made in this system since it began, all went well. Due to human intervention in the selection process of cattle breeding (progress) one “faucet  was too big for the calf to nurse on.

Making use of old-fashioned backwards technology, I saddled up a horse and together with a Border Collie doing what her ancestors had been doing for centuries, we brought the new family to the barn for assistance. All of our old technology worked perfectly. My next order of the day was to begin dragging the hay meadows. To the unenlightened, this means a process of spreading the “used hay” deposited by the cows in little piles throughout the meadows. To accomplish the task I boarded my 46-year-old tractor and hooked onto a harrow that was old when my father bought it on a farm sale 40 years ago. In spite of the combined ages of the tractor, harrow and me totaling about a century and a half, we had a fine day. By late afternoon the meadows had the fine groomed look of a golf course. This, of course, was through the eyes of one who likes a good smooth grass hay meadow and doesn’t particularly like golf. You’ll notice no mention of unhappiness, no negativity. I’ve painted a picture of a content, happy, old-fashioned guy.

Every weekday ends with me going into the studio here on the ranch to record the Livestock News Network radio program for the next morning. I leave the old, tried and true world of horses, harrows and happiness and enter our high tech recording studio. There, a computer costs more than my tractor yet will be obsolete in two years. A single microphone would purchase 20 harrows but, hey, it’s OK because this stuff is as good as it gets. As I sat down to begin my program, the local electric company decided to flash our electricity long enough to crash my computer. Once Sue got it working for me again, we discovered our “server” was not serving and we could not broadcast. As I sat in my state of the art, high tech studio, it slowly began to creep over me ... grouchiness. If 50 years ago they could make things that not only worked but would continue to work for at least 50 more years, why can’t our wonderful progressive world come up with a few things that will work dependable.

I’m sorry, I do not like progress. It makes me a grumpy old man.