I don’t get rap music.  M&M, Snoop Dog, you name them.  They can’t hold a candle to my editor, publisher and friend John Gardiner.  Last Saturday night at Stargazers on the Thames, John belted out a wildly crazy rap tune on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of me writing my agricultural column, “Under the Agridome”.

It wasn’t John’s first rap tune.  I heard him belt out another original rap tune the “King of Hearts” last year at the Thamesville United Church.  I never knew they had a “hood” back in the day in Hanover.

It was a great night last Saturday at Stargazers.  I threw a party, something, which I think I’ve almost never done.  I had invited most of my editors from across Ontario plus many of my friends within the agricultural bureaucracy.  Mixing the mandarins with the media can be a caustic mix.  Seeing everyone having a good time sealed the deal for me.  If the Agridome gets another 20 years, we’ll have another one.

After our star rapper got off stage, I said a few words.  It was very meaningful to me to have that opportunity.  I’ve had a lot of help through the years.  It was great to have friends, family and co-workers together for a bit of fun.

One thing I wanted to do during the evening was reminisce about how things had changed over the years.  That was almost as fascinating as having that much longevity.  In short, technology over a period of 20 years had changed everything.

20 years ago I wrote by long hand.  For those of you too young to know what that means I took a pen and paper and wrote a column.  With all the cross outs and ink marks I drove that column down to editor John Gardiner.  However, it could be at any time of night.  So I’d put that piece into a slot through his door.  The next day John would peer at his door, pick it up and take it to the Wallaceburg News.

The adventure at that point was getting it in the paper.  John used old type setting machines, which were the precursor to our modern personal computers.  I still don’t know how he did it, but those few scraps of papers turned up on Page 5 every week.

That is what it is.  I’ll let others in the publishing business muse about that.  What I find interesting is how things advanced and got easier and better.  It was only a few years later when I bought a fax modem.  They didn’t have them for PC’s at the time, but in the Mac world they were everywhere.  After that my column in packs of one’s and zero’s flew through the phone lines and out of the fax machine at the Wallaceburg News.

Everything changed when the Internet came along.  Email replaced fax and the World Wide Web made it easier to get research material.  A few years later Apple came out with the iPod and “podcasting” came into vogue.  It’s been a long time since that first column went through the slot.

That’s one thing, however how technology affected my day job is another.  Agriculture in 1986 was a lot different than it is now.  Back in those days farmers used to “plant their crops in a cloud of dust” and looked to see what came out of the ground.  Now farmers don’t work the ground, they plant genetically modified crops and their tractors can be guided from satellites in space.  Production per acre has risen exponentially and food demand has expanded too.

We had many of the same problems we have now.  Agriculture will always have its inherent problem of its own economics.  That means consistently low prices and the challenge of having an agricultural policy to fix that.  However, other than the advent of genetically modified food, what’s happening to agriculture in 2006 is even more interesting.  For the first time in my career agriculture is moving from a feeder of the food system to a feeder of our fuel system.  Ethanol and the advent of other bio-fuels have infused agriculture with more revenue and renewed hope for the future.

So we will do it all again in 20 years.  However, in the writing business you never know even if you will be around next week.  As things change, you must change with it.  I guess I did that as the decades passed, one column at a time.  As one friend said last Saturday night, “20 years, how times flies!”