Gabby Hayes Was Ahead of His Time

"They're shot from guns, buckaroos!"

When I was a kid Gabby Hayes, a gnarly old cowboy sidekick, was on TV every Saturday morning pushing, among other things, Quaker Puffed Wheat and Quaker Puffed Rice, the cereals "shot from guns."  It made no sense to me as to how or why they shot perfectly good cereal from guns but old Gabby said they did and that was good enough for me.

Apparently, out of desperation, some of America's farmers are now cramming all kinds of produce into air guns and charging city slickers for the privilege of firing corn, apples, and even pumpkins into the wild blue yonder.  New tariffs and long slumping prices for most all things agricultural have inspired farmers to seek new ways to monetize their bounty and nothing is more American than firepower and a satisfying splat. It's all about the bottom line.  Corn is going for less than $4 per bushel on the open market and a guy like Fred Howell, a Cumming, Iowa farmer, can charge city rubes $2 a pop to fire four shots from his corn cannon.  That, farm friends, works out to roughly $100 a bushel.  The family who owns Hillcrest Orchard in Hendersonville, North Carolina added an apple cannon a couple of years ago and now sometimes has lines of people waiting 30 minutes or more to blast apples into applesauce.  Last year the orchard hauled in $20,000 in cannon proceeds easily defraying the $5,900 cost of the big gun.  The big daddy of food shooting ordinance has to be the pumpkin cannon at Stade's Farm & Market in McHenry, Illinois.  That bazooka, made from an old water main, is 42 feet long, weighs over a ton and shoots up to six pumpkins at a time.  Vern Stade, the owner, says he has pumped better than $30,000 into his master blaster and is not yet bragging about what kind of return shows up on his bottom line.

All of this countrified creativity got me thinking.  My brother and I have a small farm in central Illinois that, thanks to farmer Larry, pumps out ever-increasing amounts of corn and soybeans.  With prices so low we've been considering adding a distillery and, like the wineries do,  setting up a corn whiskey tasting room that would also feature all the edamame you can eat.  It's either that or buying a food cannon.  We Americans do like playing with our food so we'll give it a lot of consideration.  I'll ask Gabby what he thinks.  I'm guessing he'll be down for the whiskey tasting room and reasonably priced (see expensive) jugs of "genuine double rectified bust head."

"I figured you could use a little somethin' to get the trail dust out of your throat, Duke."