There goes the neighborhood!

I've shared this before, but since I'm gaining all you wonderful new readers, I'll tell you again. I live in a bean field.

Yep, smack in the middle of a beanfield, in nowhere Missouri, that's my lil' house. Sometimes it's not beans, sometimes it's corn but the routine is pretty much the same. beansbeansbeansbeansbeans lana's house beansbeansbeansbeansbeans.

I kinda like it that way to be honest.

So anyway, every year there's a build up in the spring, excited to see some plant life, then it starts to grow, and grow, and grow, and you get a new privacy fence. It's wonderful to hear the wind blow through the beans or even better the corn. A couple months ago, I decided to document for you, what this looks like from my perspective.

Yeah, I know many of you have seen soybeans, in fact, some of you might have your own soybean field, but there are many places on this planet that have never see it... some of those people read here. (I even have a readers from Dubai and Brunei!) So play along everyone, let's be nice to our out of town guests!

In August, the beans looked like this. It's about waist high, and it's a sea of moving swaying green life. Sometimes it's cool to just stand there and hear all the leaves rustle together. It's so bright green and just feels like summer.

This is the view of my neighbor's house down the road across the beans. I'm sure you know that soybeans are used in meat replacements and biofuel. But did you also know that it's used for things like insulation, cosmetics and vodka?

Here is an interesting article about soybeans, and the politics of them. Yeah, there's politics in soybeans.. deep politics that I know nothing about, so I'll let those ppl that know about it and understand it explain it.

In September, they slowly started to die, as the days turned cooler. The beans turn to a pretty gold color:

Then BAM, one day, you're eating cereal and reading Perez Hilton MSN, and think "wth is that noise?" Yep, then you see this outside your back door:

That my friends, is what a quarter of a million dollars looks like. Approximately.

It trolls along and scours the earth until every little last bit is gone.

It's kind of a culture shock, seeing all this life around you suddenly disappear. Kind of like in the spring when Gene shaves off his winter beard. I can't decide for a week or two if I really like it or not.

Around the time I get used to the beans being gone, I hear a familiar noise coming down the road across the street. (And by "street" I mean rural gravel road)

This time it's the corn's turn.

Another quarter million comes trolling by, cutting away one swath at a time.

The process is actually really interesting. The corn is cut and cleaned as it goes through the combine. There is tons of debris that shoots out of the back as this happens.

Then a tractor pulls along side, and they don't stop moving, too much to do for that. So the tractor is pulling a wagon and it fills from the combine's hopper where it's stored.

Once the wagon is full it gets hauled off down the road to the awating semis.

Then another chute comes out and offloads to the semi's where then it's taken to a local grain place where it's sold. This, of course, is my highly technical description, I can dumb it down for you a bit more if you need me to. ;P

When I was in junior high, I had a couple friends that went out on this process. They were sitting on the edge of the wagon as it offloaded, pushing the corn with their feet. For the record, you don't need to, it does it itself, but you know, they were kids and wanted to be in the way pain in the asses.

Well, one friend slipped and fell into the corn. She was literally drowning in corn.

The second friend screamed for help and one of the farm hands had a shovel and started shoveling as fast as he could. They saved her!

She said that all she could do, was swallow as much corn as came into her mouth. She also said a few weeks later, she blew her nose and out came some corn.
blech.
Not cool.

Being alive IS cool tho.
Stay out of the corn kids, be cool.

Now the earth is naked again, and the wind seems to be blowing harder than ever with nothing there to slow it down. I can see a mile in almost every direction and the dust and debris kicks up everywhere. I'm not looking forward to that winter blowing snow in drifts that cover my car and keep Gene from going to work.

But the up side to this, is the skies are larger again... and I'm back in small sky country - which is just like big sky country only smaller ;)

Happy Fall Ya'll