It sure sounds like a great way to pass time, giving away billions of dollars. The fact that they seem to think deeply about the implications of their wealth, as well as their methods of getting and giving, makes them even more noteworthy. Thanks to tax-payer, and listener-supported National Public Radio in the USA for bringing the other brother/son to our attention with this story:

Get Howard Buffett into the cab of a big ole’ farm tractor and he’s like a kid — albeit a 58-year-old, gray-haired one. He’s especially excited when it comes to the tractor’s elaborate GPS system, which he describes as “very cool.”

“I’m driving hands-free,” says Buffett, the son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett.

He says that the tractor has been automatically set to plant 16 perfect rows of seeds, “so it makes everything more efficient. And it’s going to give you a better crop in the end.”

What Buffett hopes to get out of his 1,400-acre research farm in southern Arizona, about an hour east of Tucson, are better crops and more efficient land use, for poor subsistence farmers and also for large corporate farmers. It’s part of the work he and his charitable foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, are doing to try to reduce hunger around the world.

When Buffett was a kid, he loved to play in the dirt, and he grew up to be a farmer. So, when his father gave him money to run his foundation — about $2 billion so far — it wasn’t hard for him to figure out what he wanted to do.

Buffett says it makes no sense that millions of small farmers around the world have trouble feeding their own families, and that millions of Americans struggle to get enough nutritious food to eat.

“You’ve got a global food problem,” he says. “You’ve got a food problem in the United States. You’ve got a food problem in Africa … in Asia. And so the truth is, the U.S. is going to have to produce more, on not very many more acres, honestly. And so we’re going to have to do a better job.”

That’s why Buffett has this research farm and two others like it, in Illinois and South Africa. Driving around the hot Arizona desert, he checks in with one of his managers on how things are going. What makes Buffett so unusual for a rich philanthropist is he’s down to earth, totally hands on.

They test a lot of things here: soil content, planting techniques and irrigation. They’re trying to learn how to make drought-prone land more productive and then figure out how to get that information to struggling farmers in Africa and elsewhere.

Buffett says they’re even testing two oxen — named Ike and Earl — to see what farm implements they can carry and for how long, to help poor farmers use the animals more efficiently.

Read the rest of the story, and listen to the podcast, here.