The Clever Tech Keeping America’s (Many) Disabled Farmers On The Job

As many as one in five US farmers suffers from a disability that impacts their physical health, senses, or cognition. Offsetting that statistic and keeping Americans fed are technologies like four-wheel-drive golf carts, auto-locking tractor hitches, and even boring old smartphones.

By Nick Stockton
Wired
Nov 8, 2018

Excerpt:

In 1982, Ed Bell was 21 years old, owned 1,000 hogs, and was running his parent’s farm in Hagerstown, Indiana. He was just beginning to get serious with a girl named Debbie. But Debbie had a jealous ex-boyfriend, who had a .44 caliber revolver.

“I was shot, and paralyzed from under my arms all the way down,” he says. After three months in the hospital, Bell came home in a 28-pound stainless steel wheelchair that he could barely navigate through his family’s log cabin home. His dreams of hog farming fell apart. His parents nearly lost the farm.

It was technology, coupled with his tenacity, that got him back to work. Bell now has two electric wheelchairs, one with treads for off-roading through his fields and another that allows him to stand up. Mechanical lifts made by a company called Life Essentials get him in and out of his tractors, the controls of which have been modified so he can operate them solely by hand. The only reason he had time to talk to me in the middle of harvest was because a storm had rolled in.

Read the complete article here.