COW COUNTING

It was a windy day and a little nippy, but that didn’t stop us from chewing the fat on the Applewood Manor Rocking Chair Porch. There were four of us. Me, of course. Then there was John Parker and Robert Edward Hood. If you recall, Bob, that’s what everybody calls him, is a retired military man. The fourth man, from Philadelphia, was a first-time guest at Applewood. He was telling us about his visit to the Biltmore Estate. He had not expected to see pigs or cows and sheep, and he was amazed at the technology involved.

I suppose Bob got tired of listening, so he said, “Well , all that talk of livestock raising and technology reminds me of a story I heard. This happened over in Rutherford County—that’s about an hour from here near Possum Hollow Farm. Anyway, this farmer was busy herding his livestock when suddenly a brand-new BMW convertible came down the road and stopped alongside the fence where the farmer and his dog stood. The driver, a young man in one of them skinny suits wearing RayBan® sunglasses leaned over and asked the farmer, ‘If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?’ The farmer looks at the man, who obviously is a millennial, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, ‘Sure, why not?’”

Then, Bob using his military leader style voice continued to recount the encounter between the two men. “That young feller whipped out his notebook computer, connected it to his Apple cell phone, and surfed to a NASA page on the Internet. There he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop® and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. In seconds, he gets an email that his image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL® database through an ODBC connected Excel® spreadsheet in the Cloud and, after a few minutes, gets a response. He prints out a full-color, 14-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet® printer, turns to the farmer and says “You have exactly 686 cows and calves.”

“That’s amazing,” said the farmer. “Least, you got the count right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves.” He watches the young man make his selection and stuff the struggling animal into the trunk of his car.

The guest from Philadelphia said. “Wow—all that technology is mind blowing!” Bob had this big old smile on this face as he said, “You haven’t heard the rest of the story yet. I’m going to repeat it just as they said it to each other. The farmer spoke first.”

“Hey feller, if I can tell you exactly what your business is and where you live, will you give my animal back. And maybe 20 bucks to boot?” The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?”

“You work for the federal government. You live in Washington D.C., and you haven’t been out of the city much at all.”

“Wow! That’s correct,” says the millennial, “but how did you guess that?”

“No guessing required.” answered the farmer.

“First, you showed up here even though nobody called you.

“Second, you want to get paid for an answer I already knew.

“Third, you answered a question I never even asked.

“Fourth, you used millions of dollars of equipment trying to show me how much smarter you are than me.

“Fifth, you don’t know a dang thing about livestock—or about cows, for that matter. This here is a herd of sheep.

“Now that we are done with all this nonsense, give me back my dog you just put in your trunk!”