If you will note the photo of my tractor driving down a narrow road you will see that the oak trees are nearly covering the road.
The crazy doctor lives at the top of the hill at an old dairy. He is converting the place to a natural habitat paradise but he has to have money so he rents it out to a neighbor farmer. This makes it a difficult place to farm. I've planted it once or twice.
The way the story goes is that those oak trees had grown together forming a canopy over the road. The canopy kept getting lower and lower so eventually vehicles would not be able to travel down the road.
The county sent out some of its highly ambitions workers to start trimming trees.
Well the good doctor went nuts at the violation of his tree space. Something about biodiversity and global warming and George Bush. They didn't pay a lot of attention to him till he grabbed his rifle.
The workers did not get real upset, they just called the sheriff and took the rest of the day off. The Dr. had to go to jail for the evening.
Then they cut the trees.
You can't fight city hall.
In these other two photos you can see a field I planted last fall. It is former hay ground and is on the wrong side of the hill to be good soil. And it is very wet. That is why the wheat is kind of yellow.
But, look at the skips and the wide guess rows. I planted this in the dark in blinding dust. All I had to go by was my GPS. It is not as bad as I feared but not as good as people like to see.
If you look at the last photo you can see that it looks like I forgot to do the corner. Actually I did the corner using GPS. The sputnick had drifted so I was offset half a drill width. I made my three passes down the corner but since it was offset, it didn't matter.
GPS could be amazing but I don't have the $3,000-$6,000 that it seems to take to make it work on hillsides.
Today it is raining.
I had four acres to do at home and then another 14 for a neighbor. Monday I have a 100+ acre job. But, it is on hillsides. My last job was supposed to be 150 acres but it turned out to be 92 acres. I need more work.
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I can't even imagine planting by GPS, though I guess it would be safer than flying on auto-pilot. Here in West Virginia, the main problem is finding a field big enough that the tractor can get up to operating speed before you have to turn around.
ReplyDeleteRe: your tree-hugging neighbor
ReplyDeleteWe had a doctors wife in the next valley (hollow) that felt that way about about "God's wild creatures" until the coyotes started eating the litter of kittens on her back porch. She's still a goofball, but not quite to the degree she was.