Daily Joy Ride

Sometime within the next thirty years of lifetime, I'm expecting a personal aircraft to become part of my daily routine as a means to quickly survey the food forest from above for gaining a sense of what might be best done at ground level to maintain and enhance its productivity.

Such personal aircraft already exist today but with limited payload and flight time. Maybe by the time I decide to get one they'll have figured out how to make them much more useful. Until then, it's fun to daydream a little about how morning aerial surveys might facilitate this.

In the soft, golden light of dawn, when dew still clings to broad leaves of mulberry trees and the air is thick with scents of jasmine and damp earth, begins the morning aerial survey. Flying as a centenarian, though the word feels too heavy for someone whose eyes retain the sharp, predatory clarity of a hawk. At one hundred years old, a legacy that is both ancient and futuristic has been grown: a six-acre climax food forest providing a self-sustaining ecosystem of unparalleled biodiversity. But before touching the soil, it's time to take to the sky.

The vehicle of choice, a 2055 model made by Pivotal, a sleek, all-electric personal eVTOL aircraft awaits with several preset flightplans loaded and ready for selection from its onboard GPS navigation unit. It sits on a small permeable-paver pad near the forest house, powered by the same harvested solar energy that fuels the house and its systems . Climbing into the cockpit with a practiced agility that defies a century of life, the pre-takeoff excitement mounts. No need to touch a joystick or a throttle. Instead, a single tap on a haptic interface suffices to initiate the morning's chosen plan: Survey Delta.

The aircraft rises with a confident whisper of noise-minimizing props—a low-frequency hum that barely disturbs nesting birds in the canopy below. It ascends to fifty feet, then begins a slow, preloaded GPS-guided sweep of the perimeter punctuated by several pauses in hover mode. From this vantage point, three decades of accomplishment is clearly apparent. While the surrounding landscape of the county is a patchwork of thirsty lawns and monoculture crop fields, the six acres directly below contain a verdant explosion. Not a farm in the traditional sense; it is a superbly designed wilderness.

The Architecture of Abundance

Organized into seven distinct layers, its a sustainable, regenerative growing system borne from three decades of focused, innovative, AI-assisted planning and implementation. As the aircraft glides silently over the rich parcel's overstory, massive crowns of walnut and pecan trees are closely examined for signs of distress. Beneath them, the understory of apple, pear, and stone fruit trees creates a secondary canopy. Lower still, there are the shrubs—blueberries, currants, and hazelnuts—interwoven with herbaceous perennials like comfrey and artichoke.

The GPS course proceeds over the central "wet zone," a series of interconnected swales and ponds that capture every drop of rainfall, ensuring the food forest remains resilient even in the height of a summer drought. From the air, subtle shifts in color indicate growing patches in need of attention—a yellowish tint in a patch of citrus suggesting a nitrogen deficiency, or telltale silvering of a branch that might host a specific pest. This aerial reconnaissance is the daily "big picture" moment, a way to witness macro-developments of the food forest curated for decades.

Three Decades of Growth

This journey into silviculture began as a response to the fragility of global supply chains and ultra-toxic political upheavals driven by intolerant cultists too self-absorbed to give a rats ass about future generations. A single person creating a system producing more growth energy than consumed. Its success is evident in the sheer density of life below. The food forest doesn't just produce sustenance for its tender; it produces soil, climate stability, and habitat.

The aircraft reaches the southern boundary, where the forest buffers against a paved farm and market roadway. Here are planted "pioneer species"—hardy, nitrogen-fixing trees like black locust and alder shielding more delicate fruit trees from high winds. The aircraft auto-executes a smooth, banking turn, its radar and GPS sensors constantly scanning the terrain to maintain a precise altitude. As it heads back toward the landing pad, the aircraft passes over the "wild zone," a half-acre arc of land left entirely to its own devices to encourage pollinators and predatory insects that act as natural pest control.

The landing is as seamless as the flight. The automated system flares the craft gently, touching down on the pad with a pillow-soft thump. The flight has lasted exactly sixty minutes—long enough to map out the day's tending tasks, but short enough that the coffee is still warm in the thremos holder. Lingering a bit in the comfortably-padded aircraft pilot seat after motors halt, the sounds of the food forest's collaborating inhabitants become evident.

Tending the Ground

Once back on terra firma, the pace shifts from digital precision flight through the air to tactile rhythm of the earth. The "labor" of the forest is no longer back-breaking toil of youth. The forest has reached a state of "climax stability," largely maintaining itself.

Late mornings proceed at a leisurely pace. Carry a small wicker basket to harvest a few dozen pawpaws or a handful of hardy kiwis. The tools are simple: a pair of sharp pruning shears and a digging stick. Because the aircraft identified a fallen limb near the eastern swale, that task can wait until the tractor is fired up for use.

The beauty of this accomplishment is its thoughtful design implemented out through concerted physical effort. There is no tilling, no weeding in the traditional sense, and no chemicals application. The "weeds" are often medicinal herbs or nutrient accumulators that can be simply choped and droped in place to mulch the soil.

A Symbiosis of High-Tech and High-Touch

By then, life will have become a testament to a philosophy I like to think of as "Techno-Agrarianism", and that humanity’s future lies not in returning to a primitive past, but in utilization our most advanced technologies to facilitate a return to ecological harmony. The solar panels charging the aircraft and the GPS satellites that guide its flight are invisible scaffolding that facilitates living a deeply grounded, ancestrally simpatico lifestyle.

At midday, retreat to the shade of a massive white oak is in order. From here, the six acres feel infinite. The air is several degrees cooler inside the forest than it is on the asphalt-capped roadway adjacent to the food forest. The breeze and squirrels and birds and insects and microbes—are now the "top engineers" of the food forest, in charge of dispersing and nurturing seeds of new growth.