for endless piles of grain

It's harvest time again. I didn't grow up in a farming community at all. I grew up on the Jersey Shore, so the yearly corn harvest in Illinois is still a very novel experience for me. I mean, I had no knowledge at all about farming processes before I moved out here. I was so surprised to see that there really were farmers who looked just like the farmers in picture books, complete with overalls and feed hats, and that these farmers kept their grain in actual silos. These things had seemed a little too mythic to be true.

But they are. Every year some time in September I start to see a few fields cut down, and a few trucks full of corn, and a combine or two on the local roads, and I know we've begun. Then I hear our neighboring grain elevator start up, and I come out to a fine layer of corn chaff on the car in the morning and I know we've really begun.

I learn a little more each year. Like only last year did I realize that the pile about a football field in length and a couple stories high out by the high school was a pile of corn and not gravel as I had assumed. They're building the pile again right now. Last year it stayed there until March or April when the weather began to get warm and all the fermented grain got stinky. Then they took it away. See, I know a lot of the general process now, but I still don't know very much of the "why". Like why is some corn stored on cobs and why is some of it loose? Why is that big pile of corn sitting outside? Is it experimental? Is it animal feed? Does it all get fermented? Why?

I do know that these are detasslers. They're all lined up at the farm store on Main Street. Doesn't big farm equipment look wicked? Even with mechanical detasslers, farmers still hire high school and college kids to work as manual detasslers in the summer. Our babysitter tried it this year. It's really hard work, but it pays well, and really, if you're a kid in a small town there aren't too many summer jobs to be had. Interesting detassling article here.

That's it for the Jersey Girl Farm Report '07. Even more insightfull next year, I promise.