In one way, and one way only, farming  must be like living in Los Angeles.  If you don’t have much money,  it’s nothing but a constant, demoralizing  hassle. If you have lots of money  (make that lots and lots of money), it  could be fun.

Last week, the 52nd Iowa  Power Farming Show took over  all of the exhibition space at  the Iowa Events Center – those  spray rigs take up a fair amount  of room – with 1,452 booths  and $20 million worth of  equipment, according to the  program. If you could have  walked in there and bought  everything that looked like it  would be fun to play with, you  would be eager for planting  season right now.

A farmer who is truly up to  date can let his tractor steer itself, spray  chemicals without ever overlapping  more than an inch and check the temperature  of the grain in his bins from a  comfortable chair in his house.

Sounds like office work with no  bosses and no meetings.

One company was selling video cameras  that can make the old farmstead  more efficient. A camera in the barn  during calving season would save you a  few trips out there in the dark. A camera  pointing at the front of your baler  means you can check the hay feeding  into it without craning your neck  around all the time. A camera on the  end of the spout of a great big grain cart  lets you see inside a truck trailer as you  transfer corn or soybeans.

“You can keep adding monitors and  controls until it’s like Best Buy inside  your tractor cab,” one salesman said  encouragingly.

And when you’re off somewhere in  your pickup truck, you can rely on various  other cameras to see who’s nosing  around the place.

“Can you send the video to your cell  phone?” one guy asked. Sheesh, these  farmers are never satisfied.

All in all, it’s like the agribusiness version  of the Home & Garden Show.Deep  in the winter,homeowners forget about  mosquitoes and humidity, and picture  themselves working happily  in a paradise of a garden.  Maybe farmers forget about  long hours and broken  machinery and think only  about the satisfaction of  doing what they want to do  on a beautiful afternoon.

This is why we’re fortunate  to have winter. It was given to  us just for purposes of comparison.

Not much at the Power  Farming Show for a less-thanhobby-  farmer. Although I did  enjoy the video about grinding up  stumps and small trees with a skidloader  and an extremely brutal-looking  attachment. That, I think, would be  hours of entertainment.

Mostly I thought about how a farmer  is so much on his own in deciding  whether it’s worthwhile to spend a few  hundred dollars on parts that are  alleged to handle cornstalks better during  harvest, or whether it would pay to  buy a grain cart the size of a yacht. His  banker might disagree about “on his  own”; but still, there is the satisfaction  of having your own little empire.

Of course, when you don’t actually  know much, you don’t always know  when to be impressed. I found it amazing  that you can apply a drop of fertilizer  to each individual seed as it’s planted.  Imagine that, I thought, treating  seeds one by one while planting hundreds  of acres.

So I asked the guy selling the fertilizer  how long that technology had been  around. He guessed about 60 years. I  moved on.