Sunset On An American Farm
This is the farm, that I see from my classroom, as it looks from Airport Road which runs in front of the school. We are looking mostly to the south from the west side of the field. The sun is setting over the maturing soybeans and the shadows from the trees that grow on the west side of the road are much longer than what can be captured in a photo. The wooden corn crib was probably built in the early 1900s at a time when farmers would walk down the rows, handpicking the corn and tossing the ears one at a time into a slowly moving, horse-drawn wagon. They would pick the ear, remove the husk and throw it against the backboard of the wagon. My father and his father and brothers harvested their corn this way. I grew up in town.
Once the corn was picked and shucked, the ears were stored in a corn crib, a wooden building like the red one in this photo. My father told me that these buildings were constructed of milled old growth white pine that weathered well. The buildings were built for air flow with spaced slats for the sides and and a central access driveway so that a horse-drawn wagon could be first driven into the building, loaded and unloaded, and then driven out. It would be difficult to back a wagon out with horses, so there had to be a door at each end.
In the second half of the twentieth century, tractors and mechanized corn pickers, and self-propelled combines made these old corn cribs obsolete. Combines not only pick and husk the ears, they remove the kernels from the cobs and expel the chaff and crop debris directly into the field. The loose kernels couldn’t be stored in the corn cribs because they would fall through spaces between the slats, so the farmer had to install silos like the two metal ones seen in the photo. Whereas the old corn cribs allowed the corn to dry naturally on the cobs, corn harvested as loose kernels had to be dried by warmed forced air. The drier for the silos in the photo are on the other side. These silos were also used for storing soybeans.
Most people who grow up in town don’t realize how difficult it is for farmers to maximize their crop profits. Beyond the vagrancies of the weather each year, they have to watch the corn and bean markets and keep track of political events that might affect prices. Farmers can: 1) sell their crop as futures, ahead of harvest; 2) sell it as they harvest it at whatever price they can get; 3) build silos to store it on their own property and hope that the prices go up and the crop doesn’t spoil; or 4) rent storage at a commercial grain elevator and hope the prices go up enough to make more profit after paying the storage fee. There’s risk in each of these, it’s all a gamble.
Unfortunately, since this land is withing the city limits of Bloomington, Illinois, it is slated to be developed. This farm would probably have been gone already if it weren't for the economic slowdown.
Sunset On An American Farm
This is the farm, that I see from my classroom, as it looks from Airport Road which runs in front of the school. We are looking mostly to the south from the west side of the field. The sun is setting over the maturing soybeans and the shadows from the trees that grow on the west side of the road are much longer than what can be captured in a photo. The wooden corn crib was probably built in the early 1900s at a time when farmers would walk down the rows, handpicking the corn and tossing the ears one at a time into a slowly moving, horse-drawn wagon. They would pick the ear, remove the husk and throw it against the backboard of the wagon. My father and his father and brothers harvested their corn this way. I grew up in town.
Once the corn was picked and shucked, the ears were stored in a corn crib, a wooden building like the red one in this photo. My father told me that these buildings were constructed of milled old growth white pine that weathered well. The buildings were built for air flow with spaced slats for the sides and and a central access driveway so that a horse-drawn wagon could be first driven into the building, loaded and unloaded, and then driven out. It would be difficult to back a wagon out with horses, so there had to be a door at each end.
In the second half of the twentieth century, tractors and mechanized corn pickers, and self-propelled combines made these old corn cribs obsolete. Combines not only pick and husk the ears, they remove the kernels from the cobs and expel the chaff and crop debris directly into the field. The loose kernels couldn’t be stored in the corn cribs because they would fall through spaces between the slats, so the farmer had to install silos like the two metal ones seen in the photo. Whereas the old corn cribs allowed the corn to dry naturally on the cobs, corn harvested as loose kernels had to be dried by warmed forced air. The drier for the silos in the photo are on the other side. These silos were also used for storing soybeans.
Most people who grow up in town don’t realize how difficult it is for farmers to maximize their crop profits. Beyond the vagrancies of the weather each year, they have to watch the corn and bean markets and keep track of political events that might affect prices. Farmers can: 1) sell their crop as futures, ahead of harvest; 2) sell it as they harvest it at whatever price they can get; 3) build silos to store it on their own property and hope that the prices go up and the crop doesn’t spoil; or 4) rent storage at a commercial grain elevator and hope the prices go up enough to make more profit after paying the storage fee. There’s risk in each of these, it’s all a gamble.
Unfortunately, since this land is withing the city limits of Bloomington, Illinois, it is slated to be developed. This farm would probably have been gone already if it weren't for the economic slowdown.