We saw these things everywhere between Missouri and Tennessee and they were usually alongside large stainless steel silos. Obviously agricultural, but what exactly? There is nothing like this in Washington state. I know, I've seen all of Washington state by now *lol*
Also, I love those perfect green circles the rotating irrigators make near Ellensburg, WA. so practical, and perfect when viewed with Google Earth. It took me a while driving on I-90 to realize those were rotating things, cuz from the highway you cannot really see how they work, how they move. But Google Earth tells the story from above:
Well done, Washington, taking that arid land and connecting it with that river and making food for animals and people.
Where I live now, no one moves water. Hay, corn, rapeseed, rye, wheat, all grows from the rain. I just love driving through my home state and seeing the ingenuity with my own eyes.
The hayfield across the street from us had its first cutting in the beginning of MAY if you can believe it, and is now ready for a second. What a blessing. We have a hay barn full of hay from last year and we need to sell it cuz we need room for this year's hay. We've never had that problem before, what a nice problem to have.
Also, Washington, best horse sculpture ever:
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I'm looking at the photos on my phone bc I'm still on the X-State Ride, but the mysterious things are probably chutes to move grain between the grain elevator and trucks. I've seen a lot of them on this ride, because we almost always camp next to grain elevators (the farmers don't need access to them this time of year, so our group is able to rent the space cheaply).
If you've never spent time in Malden or Tekoa, I think you haven't seen the whole state of Washington! We are in Malden today, and it's beautiful here.
Yes, those are grain conveyors. To be a touch pedantic, I learned they are called tube conveyors or field conveyors.
I got a bit confused by Aarene calling the storage area an elevator. In nut crops, this piece of equipment, which lifts nuts into a truck, is called the elevator. But nuts don't have the same bulk storage that grains do.
Nicole, thank you. We were surprised to see so many of them, in contrast to zero of them in the PNW. I'm fascinated by the different agriculture techniques from state to state.
We also saw what looked like rapeseed fields, along the Mississippi, the Missouri, but the yellow flowers seemed weak and thready, like you could walk through them (in Arkansas) and not necessarily crunch each one. Were they rapeseed? Raps oil is the oil we use the most in cooking in Germany. When we arrived home, it went from 60 cents per liter to 5 Euros. I'm trying to learn how to cook without oil lately.
If you didn't see them in the PNW, maybe you weren't looking? Or maybe only consider the "wet" side to be PNW? I saw dozens of these every day in the Palouse, which is part of the PNW!
Looks like rapeseed is mostly grown in the Pacific NW now. It was grown in the American South in the 1980's and 90's (according to the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center). In Canada they grow a (superior) variant of rapeseed, which they call "Canola."
Thus ends the research for today!
We were looking, but only along i90. We saw a lot of crappy looking (sick?) canola fields in the south, some along the Mississippi. Germany is resplendent with them and it is our cooking oil of choice. Unfortunately since the war, the price of our oil went from 1E to 5E per liter: (
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