View From The Cab

By David Tollefson, Columnist

Recently I had a chance to spend a weekend with my sister, Grace, who lives in Steilacoom, Wash. She lives by herself in that suburb of Seattle, right along the lovely Puget Sound. Her whole family (her son, wife and three high school kids) lives in Daniel Island, near Charleston, S.C. That’s about as far across the entire USA as you can get.

Her son, a pilot for Southwest Airlines, helps her arrange airline tickets to get to and from South Carolina. It is rare that I get to see her on any of those cross-country trips. But that particular weekend she was invited to a wedding in Des Moines, Iowa. The plan was that I was to pick her up in the Twin Cities area, after an overnight “red eye” flight which was to arrive at 6 a.m. in Minneapolis. Rather than having to meet her at 6 a.m., she arranged for a shuttle trip from the airport to Rogers. That would give me time to spend a couple hours driving to Rogers to meet her, and drive to Des Moines that same day.

Well, as sometimes happens when she travels “standby,” there was not room for her on that flight. So, she had to spend the night at the Seattle airport, then catch a flight to Denver, Colo., then get on a connecting flight to MSP.

The original plans did not pan out, so Grace and I connected about dark that same day. I had been looking forward to a daylight drive both to and from Des Moines.

Grace had booked a hotel in downtown Des Moines for two nights, so we hated to change that. We started out going south, had a nice dinner at Albert Lea, and continued the drive.

I have been to Albert Lea before, but don’t recall ever driving on I35 south of there.

Those of you who have driven that area perhaps remember all the huge wind towers especially in Northern Iowa. In several areas, there were blinking red lights (hard to say how far away they were from the freeway). They were all in unison, so I suspected that it was the wind towers.

I have often driven along State Highway 23 southwest toward Sioux Falls, S.D., at night and have seen red lights along that highway, but don’t recall that they blinked in unison.

On the return trip a couple days later in the gorgeous sunny weather, we could easily see the hundreds of wind towers, but only a few of them were operational, which was surprising.

A number of years ago, my wife Aileen and I were in an area with lots of wind towers, many of which were not operational. I know that those towers need routine service at regular intervals. At an eating place where we stopped, I asked the waitress about that issue. She said at that time that occasionally they don’t need the power, so they shut some of them down.

As many of you know, Iowa produces by far the most corn and soybeans of any state in the nation. Anyone driving through where we did would confirm that corn and soybeans are important. So, as a corn and soybean farmer, I paid close attention to those two crops.

Most of the corn belt has had varied degrees of drought this year. I decided from a “windshield” tour that on the average their corn and beans were not much different from what we see in Pope County. (A good portion of the beans had already been harvested, but not all). I don’t think we saw even one field of sugar beets, but did see occasional fields of alfalfa.

Iowa has lots of ethanol plants, but we did not see a whole lot of them along I35.

On a map, Des Moines is in the middle of Iowa, but north to south, closer to the southern border. It is the capital of Iowa, and we stayed in the downtown area, a busy place for sure. We drove right by the state capitol buildling.

The terrain around Des Moines is a bit rolling, but going north back to Minnesota the ground is quite level, as a good part of Iowa is.

It seemed as we crossed the border back into Minnesota the terrain around Albert Lea, Owatonna and Faribault, that it definitely reminds one of the rolling hills of especially southern Pope County.

As I write this, we are a day away from a wet weekend (they say, anyway). We can surely use some more rain. I was out a few days ago discing some of my ground which will be soybeans next year. It surely was dusty.

My bean harvest is being done as I write this, by a custom harvester with two John Deere S780 combines with 40-foot headers. Does not take long to gobble up a 130-acre field. It looks like the other field, 65 acres, will be done before the rainy weekend arrives. It seemed like a good crop from driving through the fields as they are harvested.

On the south and east sides of the fields with trees alongside, there were lots of branches and twigs to clean up after the July 25 storm. The combines go around the trash, then there is a path to come in with the loader tractor and clean things up without driving down good soybeans. After that, the combine comes in and cleans up where the trash had been. Every year we see some of that, but this year was something else. We will see the same in the corn fields that are near trees.

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Please contact David Tollefson with thoughts or comments on this or future columns at: adtollef@hcinet.net