The Real Reason SpaceX Is Hiring a Farmer

​The news that SpaceX is hiring a farmer revved plenty of people's imaginations into overdrive: Is the company looking to grow corn in space? Is it going to try to terraform Mars? What the heck is a space farmer, anyway? Does it just want a tax break? Well, the mystery has been solved, and sorry to disappoint you, but it's looking like interplanetary farmers markets aren't going to happen anytime soon.

That much should have probably been obvious when it came out that the SpaceX farmer, ​a position based at its 900-acre rocket test facility in McGregor, Texas, would need only a high school education and to be able to handle John Deere equipment (although, a Martian tractor would be quite cool).

This weekend, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram put any notion that this is a space-focused position to rest: McGregor mayor Jim Hering simply required the company to create a farming position so that additional land leased to the company for its test site wouldn't go to shit.

SpaceX has been testing rockets in McGregor for several years now, but every time the company wanted to run a test, it had to notify and clear out all farmers living within a one mile radius of the test site. To circumvent that problem, in September, SpaceX leased additional land from the city around the facility, pushing several farmers off the land.

"If business goes south, we can then turn the land over to a farmer in good shape," Hering told the Star-Telegram. "I don't want it to go fallow."

Makes sense. But it's certainly not what some people originally hoped for when they saw the job listing earlier this month (and space farming certainly is something that's being worked on).

That version of the future will have to wait, but another milestone in the company's vision for cheap, relaunchable rockets is in sight: Later this week, the company is going to try to launch a rocket and then land it back on a barge, which would be a huge step toward creating fully reusable rockets.

And as for the farmer, well, SpaceX said in a statement that it "intends to do [its] best to leave this land better off than we found it. This is part of our commitment to being a good neighbor in communities where we work and live."