I always love seeing this comic here and there and thinking back to the original infamous question posed by many commenters: "what's up with the eye not on their head?"
It has been and still is common for crops to be randomly blighted. There is less of it now with science but good crops require good weather even now so farmers do play the lottery every year no matter how hard they work. It's why "losing the farm" is such a common trope.
I lived with a roommate big into the concept of Elijah. Being raised atheist, I'd never heard of it. So every meal, one extra place setting. It was odd, but there were 5 of us at a large dining room table, so not a huge deal. Because we had a lot of oddball friends, sometimes people showed up unannounced, and we always had a place for them to sit. I thought aloud, "well, that was convenient, but what if Elijah showed up?"
"How do you know that wasn't Elijah?" he'd retort.