my daughter and son-in-law's neighbor Larry farms upwards of seventeen hundred acres hereabouts...crops, if my understanding and memory are intact, including tomatoes, seed corn for companies like bayer, and dense yellow # 2 field corn which is what he graciously invited me to ride along with him as he mopped up the harvest season...so...
i found a seat on the case axial-flow combine and was given a bit more education...
the rows are spaced thirty inches apart and the plants are about six inches apart in the rows...
the combine can cover eight rows at a time and can cover eight or nine acres in an hour...and we were near that since the ride was an hour or so...
since the fields are not exact rectangles the number of passes needed to fill the hopper on the combine vary...
however four hopperfuls will fill the grain truck...Larry said this field wasn't seed corn, but rather would become ethanol...
most of what the combine left in the field was stubble and stripped cobs...as evidenced by the cobs in the road and scattered in the field...
like everything anthropogenic, the combine isn't 100% efficient...there is still some grain in the field...and with rain forecast tomorrow...
there may be some germination going on as there was in the field by the supermarket in 2017 ( although that was a bean field in july that had been a corn field the previous season...rain may come...the germination may wait )...we had some illuminating conversatiions about robotic farming, self-driving tractors, and the ( put politely ) debate over whether sustainable fuel for the air transport industry would be manufactured from corn or soy beans...knowledge gained...thanks for the ride Larry.
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