Illuminati-R-Us

We like Mason, the wife likes to remark what a cute little town we have. it is very midwestern here, we have a couple large grain elevators. Those huge metal silos full of corn and beans, with conveyors and screw tubes up to the top to fill them. A railroad next to them. It is October, which is harvest time. The elevators are busy. The grain has to come from somewhere, so the fields are busy. Harvest is just getting under way, not all the fields are dried yet.

We still have activities in Lansing. A number of my music industry friends join us for lunch every so often, usually at a hibachi restaurant on the west side of Lansing. That is all the way across town. I COULD drive through town, and hit every traffic light, wind through traffic. But I prefer to drive around the city on country roads. It adds about three miles to the trip, but I drive 55mph the whole way. This is the midwest, so it is all square corners. The middle of the country was all surveyed and laid out on a grid. Roads are a mile apart in square pattern, so you can drive up and down any number of roads and across any number of others.\

I like driving through farm land, the fields were nice and green this year, looking good. Now the crops have ripened and are left to dry. Corn is being harvested. Wheat is just stubble now. A little early for soybeans. The lush green wheat fields are now brown stubble. In fact some fields are already turning green with winter wheat. Combines are mowing down cornfields, and filling grain carts. That means the roads are filing with tractors and grain carts, but it is all a part of things. I enjoy watching the fields progress.

Though there are multiple routes I can take, I try to include the McCue rd and Grovenburg rd intersection, where the wastewater treatment plant sits. We will always have the wastewater treatment plant.

These posts always make me go and look at the places you talk about.

Must be a Scottish thing, I had a look too.

Weird landscape to me - so flat.

Indeed.

Enzo wrote: We will always have the wastewater treatment plant.

The workers wore Hi-Viz and you wore blue.

Spray it, Sam.

yes, he's thoughtful enough to provide olfactory sensations for the trip as well, not only the wastewater treatment plant but a landscaping companies offering a wide variety of mounds of fertilizers for purchase.

I had missed that it is Delhi Township, please tell me it is pronounced Dell-high.

Lianachan wrote:Weird landscape to me - so flat.

It's hard to tell how flat it is with so many trees in the way!

It's flat here, too - but if you ever get up to southern Saskatchewan, you'd swear that you could see for mileskilometres from the top of an ant hill.

*****

Soybeans are almost all out here. We must have a somewhat different season than middle Michigan - we almost always harvest beans first, and then whatever corn wasn't cut for silage (which was done in late August/early September). Winter wheat is usually harvested in early July, while spring wheat goes out in August. Hay fields are usually alfalfa, but also occasionally intermediate or brougham grass. The area around Yankton is a traditionally rich hay-producing region. West river, the farmland has a bit more variety with occasional field of oats, barley, sunflowers, sorghum, or even cane. I'd say the bulk of it, though, is ranch land.

Yes indeed, Delhi township is pronounced Dell-High

We have a small town of Pompeii, which they pronounce POMP-E-Eye.

Growing up in the Piedmont of Maryland I always thought Michigan was flat, but really it is glacial till and occasional moraine features. SO maybe a gentle roll now and then and some hills here and there. Go out to those Great Plains, and yes, an anthill is towering.

Maybe I am confused about the wheat crops. The fields that were green earlier, have ripened, turned golden and dried, and have been harvested. SO whichever replacement crop it is has been planted and is springing up with little green blades. I appreciate a lovely green field, but a just harvested wheat field of stubble is somehow handsome to me. We do have fields of oats, but they are less common than soy, corn, and alfalfa.

yes, up one road from the wastewater plant is a landscaping supply place, with mountains of cedar chips, mulch, stone, sand, and yes pig shit. We used to raise hogs at my country place, familiar with their poop. But driving through the spread out farms of Michigan State Univ, I can get close up with horse and cow manure. Sheep poop is unobtrusive. Horse and cow poop have a nice earthy aroma. But pig poop smells not unlike human poop. Drive by a dairy barn, and it is a country aroma. Drive by a pig farm and it just stinks.

Did they actually re-seed where they harvested those crops, or is it just grass and 'volunteers' that is the green stuff coming up?
Here they only get a second crop for hay and alfalfa, but they will also sometimes seed winter wheat into the canola stubble after it has been harvested.

Enzo wrote: The middle of the country was all surveyed and laid out on a grid. Roads are a mile apart in square pattern, so you can drive up and down any number of roads and across any number of others.

Do you have 'correction lines' ? Here, all the roads running north to south have a kink every 24 miles to adjust for the curvature of the earth, as seen 1 mile below the highway here:
https://www.google.ca/maps/@49.1809521, ... a=!3m1!1e3

It looks seeded to me, very even layer of new grasses.

We do have kinks, I never really thought about corrections, Michigan has a baseline and a meridian which are the bases for the overall survey. Meridian road follows that line for parts of its length. That line/road is a couple miles east of me in Mason, and ran almost through my house in the country. Road lines were surveyed from that reference frame.

There are many places where west of the meridian and east of it the roads may be offset some, and there are also north/south offsets, but I never associated them with corrections rather than thinking they were just different sections of land surveyed, and the surveyors 200 years ago were not quite as precise as today. There are places a road moves over maybe ten yards, I had assumed it was because the road was on one side or the other of the survey line, rather than centered on it.

The east/west baseline is coincident with 8-mile road in Detroit, the city's northern boundary. Baseline road is discontinuous, but follows the line across the state.

It's pretty common here to seed winter wheat on soybean stubble.

Been riding around the last few days, my green fields are definitely planted, neat little rows of bright green something. I thought it was wheat, but could be rye. COuld be for a crop, could be green manure.

Enzo wrote:could be green manure.

:

The beans are starting to come in, though some fields still stand, pretty much just dry stalks and pods now. My green fields are growing nicely.

Our fields turned white early this week, and another 4 inches coming tomorrow.

g-one wrote:Our fields turned white early this week, and another 4 inches coming tomorrow.

Lucky buggers. We don't get much snow these days.

You may have all of my snow. I don't care for weather that sticks to my pants cuffs.

I am not so sure we have even had a frost yet here, though temps have dipped into the low 30s.

We had a frost a week or so ago. One of the dogs took the couch pillow outside over night so I had to retrieve it in the morning. The grass crunched under my socks.

We are heading into the 20s in the next few days.

Enzo wrote:We are heading into the 20s in the next few days.

Well, crap. I'll have to actually wear my jacket, then.

No frost here yet and still 8-12 C during the day,

We got out 4 inches of snow, temp. is supposed to be in the -5 to -10C range all week.
Soon that will seem like a warm spring day to look forward to.
On the plus side, no mosquitoes.

A little golf video for the Scots:
https://www.theweathernetwork.com/video ... 5276901001