A brief interlude of Indian Summer has brought out the silage trucks in full voice. The road shoulders between here and town are a' flutter with corn chips, the litter of fall, if you will. In their defense, the "corn flakes" are organic and by the end of the month the landscape will absorb them.
tractors after turning over the corn stubble and seeding the fields for an early crop of pasture grass.
Gladys and I glide past cornfields barren now of the waving corn that has kept us company all summer. The sight of fields naked but for row upon row of nubby stalks elicits a strange twinge of loss either from the barrenness of the landscape or the sense that one season is about to give way to another. The starkness of the fields puts me in mind of a couplet from the English poet Alexander Pope: "Time hovers o'er, impatient to destroy/And shuts up all the passages of joy."
The farming business is at the mercy of Mother Nature and I take some comfort in the fact the weather gods have granted the Werkhoven dairy operation a short window of dry weather in which to harvest their corn and pasture grass.
The corn crop of seven hundred plus acres is now a mountain of tractor-packed silage in the silage bunkers. As we pedal by the huge mound, the Werkhoven crew, family mostly, spread huge tarps over the pile and secure them with tire-like weights. The silage will cure and ferment for a few short weeks and then become a daily staple of the herd's diet (locally grown in the cows' backyard) to supplement the alfalfa hay trucked in (with voices, I might add, equally grating) from the hayfields in the center of the state.
Though I've several times been witness to this Valley ritual, I remain amazed at how 1000 acres of corn and grass, the work of spring and summer, can be compacted into an area less than half an acre, a feat that seems to fly full force in the face of physics....
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