Here is an excerpt from a presentation at a recent rural technology conference I attended. It refers to Oklahoma, but it is equally descriptive for much of rural America.

"The Oklahoma farmer finds life a little confusing. He gets up at the alarm of a Connecticut clock, buttons his Chicago suspenders to his Taiwan overalls, washes his face with Cincinnati soap in a Pennsylvania pan, sits down to a Grand Rapids table to eat Battle Creek cereal, Chicago meat and Tennessee flour cooked with Kansas lard on a St. Louis stove. Then he puts a New York bridle on a Missouri mule, fed with Iowa corn and plows a farm covered with an Ohio mortgage with a Moline plow. At the end of the day he says a prayer written in Jerusalem, crawls under a blanket made in Indonesia, only to be kept awake by an Oklahoma dog - the only home product on his land. But things may be getting better now ......"