what's up with industry today?

it has been less than a week since the last significant rainfall here and temperatures have been ( much to the disgust of many ) on the coolish side hereabouts...so compare the top two photos of the wheat field by the supermarket...the top one was taken six says ago, on the eighteenth of the month and the second one this morning...it startled me when i pulled into the parking lot and a closer look leaves me even more uncertain...the plant leaves in the third photo are curled up and reminiscent of members of the zea family when they are suffering water loss through transpiration...when i see sweet corn, maize, or teosinte with leaves curled like this i know it's time to water asap...my winter wheat out back is all green and happy...so what's up? are those brown and yellow spots on the leave in the bottom photo a sign of some sort of pathogen? wheat rust? don't know but i will be looking at it to try to find out...need to wash my shoes after traipsing around that field too...don't need to infect my yard if that's what's up.

no till bean field in late autumn

after i got home from campus errands took me past the no till soy bean field from last season so i stopped to have a look around...it is on sterling creek road and the area was obviously intended to be developed into housing or commercial enterprises before the great crash obviated the need for more town house condos or one more strip mall...it has been "available" for so long that nature has begun to reclaim the sidewalks...when the farmer harvested the field earlier this fall they left a carpet of mulch consisting of old corn cobs ( this was a corn field in 2012 ), corn stalks, and shredded bean stalks...it was a couple of inches thick at the time and now it has compacted down and frozen into the contours of the field...the upshot seems to be pretty effective erosion control and an organic mulch ( corn cobs have about six pounds of nitrogen per ton...it's not extreme fertilizer but that's not the point...we use too much anyway )...i am curious to see if a crop goes in here in the spring...if the monoculture rotation holds up it will be dense yellow number two and there will be planting in late may...unless some sort of walls sprout up instead.. if i didn't know better i'd say that the green stuff in the bottom photo is the ubiquitous purselane...an edible succulent i have planted elsewhere...more on whatever comes up later.