Did Mayberry Finally Meet Star Trek?

Cotton Grower Managing Editor Henry Gantz and I were talking last week about our different field day experiences over this summer.

“It’s funny,” he told me, “I’ve noticed when we’re at the same one, I go and talk to all the dads and you’re there talking to all the sons.” Now my theory has been that Henry and the dads are much less “available” to each other than me and all the Juniors are.

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When I’m looking for farmer friends from home, I’ll shoot them an email or a Facebook message and wait for them to get back to me when they can. Henry picks up the phone and winds up talking to a guy in a pickup truck on the other end.

I say all this only because we recently got Cotton Grower onto two social networking sites – Facebook and Twitter. Again, it was my little theory that we’ll mostly be able to connect to the younger farmers through the new media. Their parents, I thought, lived a more traditionally “country” life, and probably couldn’t connect to the internet from home even if they wanted to.

But then Henry and the older, wiser powers-that-be here in the office pass along articles like this one which says that 75 percent of rural America has access to broadband internet connection. In the words of that modern day prophet George Jones, maybe Mayberry really has met Star Trek.

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So if you are indeed a “bumpkin who’s plugged in,” we’d like to invite you to follow us on both social networking sites. We’ll do our best to bring you the most interesting and important cotton industry news of the day.

We also need your help in settling another little inter-office debate we’re having this week. At a cotton ginners meeting recently, we noticed that at one point during a session it seemed like every person at the conference got a text message at the same time. At once, the meeting stopped to allow everyone to check there phones.

This gave some legitimacy to Henry’s belief that most of you do the majority of your web surfing on your cell phones. I’m not so sure, but I’m willing to put it to a vote. Weigh in on this week’s poll question by letting us know if you would prefer to view Cotton247.com on your cell phone or on your computer at home.

Of course, you may not be a high-tech redneck at all, in which case we’ll gladly just send a copy of our magazine to your mailbox through a mail service. Yes, we still do that.
 

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