Saturday is here, finally.......

Saying good-bye to the country roads to the landfill. It is done! Well, the throwing away of major items from my basement is done. I made two trips on Friday, one big load and another one was bulky stuff that emptied out fast. I feel educated on the things of junk now and I know how to work the garbage landfill system.





This is the farm field right next to the landfill entrance. The hay has been baled and the trees are changing color in the distance. I like how the alfalfa hay stays green right up to when it gets so very cold and snow piles on it.






Another abandoned farm north of town. I find it sad that a lot of the original farmers have died or retired and sold out and moved south. Most of the farmstead home areas have been bought up for very little money, not the farms, but the houses and land around the house. The result is you have people who have no intention to keep up the buildings, they have ten or eleven junked cars parked all over, and the weeds are growing all the way up to the front door of the house. I would say that 20 percent of the homes on farms are very well kept up and look really nice. The result in southern Iowa is that most of those kinds of homes and out buildings have been torn down, the areas are cleared and there is no sign of any farmstead.






Silos were very important at one time as hay was made into silage and the milk cows would eat that all winter, or the beef cattle that were being fattened for market would eat the hay. Today, the majority of the silos sit empty. Large corporations feed cattle in large lots and very large dairies do the work of a few small farmers. I really like the old silos that were made from ceramic, clay fired, brick like in this silo. It has a nice color to it and they liked to make decorations at the top and sometimes diamond shaped designs in the sides.






The owner of our local cafe is a farmer and he was telling me that the corn just isn't drying out enough to be picked. His registered at 23 percent moisture content three weeks ago and he said it is still the same today. Natural gas is used to run warm blowers on the seed corn to dry it out and he said that it is too expensive to do that. Until it either gets very hot and sunny, or very cold, the corn will not be picked. Thanks for reading.....have a great Sunday!!!