We really needed a little rain a couple of weeks ago, when soybean harvest was in full swing around the county. Soybean harvest is always dusty. These pods reaching skyward are crispy crackling dry.
Soybean harvest was especially dusty this year, because our fall was so dry.
More than once, within a few miles of where I live, something wasn't quite right in somebody's combine. Something like a bearing going out, something that makes a lot of friction and enough heat in the combine to ignite a dry soybean stem or pod.
One day as I was headed home, I saw a plume of smoke billowing skyward from the direction of my house. The fire was a few miles east of us.
The wind came to whip the flames into a fury.
The volunteer firefighters came.
The old farmers came, lining the road with their old pickups, with their old bodies leaning on them, and talking about how dry it was.
The guy who drives the road grader came. The road grader is normally a slow-moving machine, crawling down the gravel with a wide blade sunk into the top bit of road, smoothing out the potholes. I glanced in my rearview and saw the road grader flying toward me, kicking up dust. You know something is wrong when the road grader is going faster than you are. The driver had been called to bring his machine and plow up some of the unharvested soybeans, creating a wide, bare patch of dirt across the middle of the field for a firebreak..
They got the fire out before it spread to neighboring fields and houses. Then it rained, and then all the soybeans were harvested,
and now corn is king.
2 comments:
this is going to sound crazy but... people from the city would pay you to let them come and be a part of something this cool - it could be like a B&B - you put people up in a spare bedroom, wake them up at 4 AM feed them a big breakfast and then let them come out in the fields and learn a little/help a little... driving some big implements like that is a dream for a lot of people with non farming backgrounds...
sounds crazy - but it might be an interesting idea...
Reed -
a homeschooling dad from Minneapolis
Reed -
I think you are correct -- there is a market for that idea. But tourism, even in this confined arena, is a whole new business that would take time and attention away from our current business of food production. Do we want to make that shift away from being the best farmers we can be, to being not-so-good farmers but a great tourist attraction for the right crowd? It might be worth it, financially, or for the opportunity to bless people and educate city folk about rural ways. Something to think about, for sure.
Thank you for your periodic comments. How did you discover my blog?
Alice
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