New Boston, New York
Corn and hay. Plenty of weeds at the edge of the side road to New Boston. These are probably feeder crops, and the cash crop is likely beef cattle, grazing somewhere else further from state route 22. They'll be getting the hay and corn later. It was fascinating to watch the tractor scooping up the harrowed hay and shooting it into the big straight body trucks (there were three of those trucks working in rotation, driving the loads back down south on 22). The equipment is old. I didn't get a close look at the combine, but the trucks were in the 20-40 year-old range, putting a lot of diesel particulate into the air as they strained out of the valley onto the highway. The precision with which the trucks held position with the output of hay was a little amazing. Maybe they were using GPS and cameras mounted on the spray arm, feeding back into the control cabins—or maybe these guys have just been doing it this way for decades, and know how to get it right.
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2 comments:
Lots of ailanthus (so-called "Tree of Heaven." Phah!), in the foreground. Alien and invasive.
I'll guess that the contents of that wagon will be off-loaded into a silo, or a silage pit, for winter feed. It will ferment, much like saurkraut, which acts both to preserve it, and to make it more palatable and nutritious.
Yes, it's much more common here to see hay being bailed, not chopped into silage. The corn and hay fields in this part of NY are really extensive and there may be a central storage area tucked away somewhere between the hills.
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