Drive-by-farming

I picked up my oldest daughter at Detroit Metro Airport today.  She came back home after a week of job interviews, looking for housing and so on.

She is a great sport.  She played navigator while we bushwhacked west from Detroit Metro airport to Eaton Rapids.

Fifteen miles west of the airport on Textile Road we ran across these entrepreneurs selling lemonade.

Here is the bunch of them.  This is serious farm country.  Great looking corn and soybeans.  The kids are well groomed, athletic and happy looking as well.

This guy noticed that the wind was blowing the signage making it unreadable.  So he stepped up, or down, to fix the problem.  People who are willing to make extra effort to solve problems are rare and valuable.

We had one near-brush with the law.

We passed one of the sweetest, neatest, apple-pie perfect small farming operations I have ever been blessed to drive by.  I stopped the car and asked my daughter to take some pictures.  We started having battery malfunctions.  "Dang, Dad.  It shut down."  So I would start to drive forward.  Then, "Dad, it is back.  Back up.  I can get that picture!"  The third time that happened, we saw a young lady strolling down the driveway with a dog (Beagle X Blue Heeler) that looked just like the beagle in the movie I am Number Four.

As we explained ourselves, she suggested we pull off the road.  Apparently, entirely by coincidence I am sure,  the local sheriff's car was approaching from the other direction.  She waved the patrol car on past.

Only one of the pictures turned out.

Chickens near closest corner of garage/barn.

 More pictures here.  Although I must tell you that the pictures fail to catch the overall sense of organization and industry that radiates from this place.

The young lady turned out to be the lady of the house.  She explained that several houses on the road had been broken into.  She said the neighbors tend to look out for each other.

She also shared that the number of break-ins had dropped off after one of the houses was broken into during broad daylight.  The burglar was not aware that the gentleman of the house, who had been in the military, was still home.  It was a case of an amateur meeting a highly motivated professional.  The police collected the burglar who was very glad to see them.

The lady of the house gave me a new term, Drive-by-farming.  Sort of a derivative of drive-by-shooting.  Hence the title of today's entry.

-Joe