104 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM And while the farm rover’s design may be devoid of flashy flourishes, it is resilient. A car hit it the day before I arrived and the rover was perfectly fine—it was the car that got damaged, Katie and Daniel recount, laughing. The impact set off a sensor and no one could get the car to stop beeping. The car illustrates one of the big complaints about modern technology in general and farm tech in particular: it’s no longer possible for farmers to fix things themselves. They have to send them off to an authorized dealer and wait for repairs. Daniel knows this from personal experience. “If my tractor breaks, I’m out of business. You can be waiting Besides a gaggle of ducks, Twisted Fields has four flocks of chickens, made up of a variety of heritage breeds and housed in mobile coops. The doors open automatically at sunrise and close at night. A row of nesting boxes are set into the sides behind red flaps. When we go to inspect one of the coops, the disgruntled birds stop pecking and scratching and hightail it out of our way. A few hens are too busy to leave the nesting box and cluck at us disapprovingly when we lift a metal flap to admire for parts from Germany for six months—which is what happened to me last time,” he says. That won’t be the case with their farm rover. “If we go out of business, you’ll be fine. You own it, you can fix it.” He and Katie are aiming to start selling rover kits later this year. In the meantime, Twisted Fields has been focused on restoring the land while raising chickens and poultry. Daniel says they grow their own chicken feed, mostly in the form of pumpkins, sunflowers and corn. “The vegetable garden, anything we don’t sell or eat ourselves, goes to the chickens,” he says. “Our chickens probably eat better than most of the people on the planet.”
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