June 19, 2022

Today, we had a different vantage point for the sunrise.

Looking out over prairie:

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At my back was a wheat field (or is it rye?): 

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Write about anything you want in the comments.

20 comments:

Leland said...

Have you considered a drone to take pictures on your camping adventures?

Beasts of England said...

Gorgeous photos!!

Enjoyed the sublime pleasure of my younger daughter’s wedding last evening. Each event of the bridal season was memorable in its own right, but dancing at the reception with four generations of our extended family was a special blessing.

farmgirl said...

3rd &5th- the curve is a sweet touch.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

Lovely... gorgeous. delightful.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

If you talk about this... thing, this hidden hand, you are labeled a conspiracy theory pusher.

The questions still remain, what do we have to say for the health authorities after Saint Fauci himself catches the bug? and other things that were not supposed to happen, keep happening all the time.

Link to Small Dead Animals blog post with links to a couple of interesting videos.

Nancy said...

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

BUMBLE BEE said...

The Future is Electric...
https://generaldispatch.whatfinger.com/it-happened-again-another-huge-news-story-hidden-from-the-public/

tim in vermont said...

So there is still some prairie left to plow under for ethanol production? Cool.

iowan2 said...

Not to be too tendentious. But. The amount of tillage done in modern production agriculture is a fraction of what it was, even twenty years ago.
These pics, are not prairie. I'm guessing winter wheat. Light tillage last fall, harvest in the next ~30 days

Sydney said...

Is that a scarecrow shadow or a haystack shadow in the fourth one?

Curious George said...

Saw Top Gun: Maverick with my son yesterday, and was a little disappointed. Other then the flying shots, which were much better but you would expect that after 36 years, the original was a better movie. Anyway it was entertaining.

ngtrains said...

Ann's shadow in 4?
interesting clouds

Ann Althouse said...

"These pics, are not prairie. I'm guessing winter wheat. Light tillage last fall, harvest in the next ~30 days."

You're misreading the text. Looking east, at the sunrise, there was prairie. Looking west, it was a field of grain. I was standing on a mowed grass path between the 2 areas.

The prairie is a prairie restoration.

This place is Pope Farm Conservancy.

Ann Althouse said...

"Ann's shadow in 4?"

Ha ha. I had to figure out a way not to be a big shadow. I hid inside the shadow of a tree.

Rusty said...

Very little of the original tall grass prairie still exists. What we are seeing is reclaimed farmland. Clean farming has done so much to eradicate original prairie vegetation that a lot of species are gone forever. The last Eastern Buffalo was killed in 1810. The buffalo made the prairie. That and the indiscriminate burning of said prairie by the first stewards of the land.

Saint Croix said...

Joe Biden has had a lot of comparisons to Jimmy Carter.

Carter was primaried by Ted Kennedy in 1980.

Hillary Clinton would be the most obvious to primary Biden in 2024. But she's already announced she's not going to do that. Bernie Sanders has also announced he's not going to run against Biden.

I would love to see Tulsi Gabbard primary Biden in 2024. That would be so much fun!

1. She's a conservative Scoop Jackson Democrat.

2. She defies her own party all the time and has been a vocal critic of Biden.

3. She's a woman and a person-of-color, which gives her a big advantage in identity politics. And of course she will give people on the left a lot of conniptions. Expect a lot of her critics to say "she's not a real woman" or "she's not a person-of-color." Some of her critics will be racist and/or sexist.

4. She is very smart, and unlike Biden she will have 100% of her faculties.

5. Biden is perhaps the weakest president I've seen in my lifetime. He is extremely vulnerable to a primary challenge.

Susan in Seattle said...

What lovely photos.

TheOne Who Is Not Obeyed said...

"That and the indiscriminate burning of said prairie by the first stewards of the land"

The first occupants, perhaps. Indigenous cultures in North America did not have the technology or ability to steward the lands they inhabited. The Hopewell may have gotten close in relatively small areas around their palisaded villages, but no other culture came close to managing the land for repetitive, successful growth of crops on the same land.

tim in vermont said...

Baby elephant tries to hide behind light pole.

https://twitter.com/WeeabooWignat/status/1538513954703540224

tim in vermont said...

re ethanol production and prairies:

“We have seen grassland conversion in virtually every state across the country,” says Tyler Lark, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. From 2008 to 2012, the United States created more than 7 million new acres of croplands, an area larger than Massachusetts, according to a study he co-authored. Another study equates grassland conversion in parts of the U.S. Corn Belt with deforestation in Brazil, Malaysia and Indonesia in the 1980s and 1990s.

https://www.nwf.org/Magazines/National-Wildlife/2018/Oct-Nov/Conservation/Ethanol


BTW: Setting fires altered ecosystems to the Indians' benefit and counted as "stewardship." Read 1491, it's an interesting book, but not the only one on the subject. In Massachusetts, Indians burned the forests frequently, and not "indiscriminately." Burning the forest created more mixes of open and forested land, increasing the population of deer, which they loved to eat. It also increased berry production, and kept down the undergrowth, making travel easier.

Just because it was hard for white settlers to understand, doesn't mean that the Indians were not using the land in effective ways. The problem for the Indians of course was that white farming practices, forest management, etc, supported larger populations, and so the Indians were inevitably driven out.

Burning the prairies created huge population of buffalo, which the US Army felt it had to kill off, in order to induce starvation and end the Indians' semi nomadic lifestyle. The Indians' prairie burning worked for food production, their falures were military.