[166/365] (Farmers are Geniuses)

[cosmolinguist]

This video is making me so happy. The farm I grew up on has a bunch of grain bins but I never knew how they were built! These are much fancier, bigger and with the fans and everything.

And I'm so excited to get to see a combine in action again -- my dad used to let me sit in the combine with him when I was young enough to need a booster seat at the table (because that's what I'd sit in) and it was better than TV for keeping me entertained. I preferred corn harvesting to the soybeans in the video (because they're such different plants, they need different "heads," they're called, for the combine and I kiked the spiky corn head with what looked to my tiny self like big teeth, munching up the corn stalks).

Honestly I love this video so much, it's so familiar I can smell the inside of the soybean bin just from seeing it (we were allowed in nearly-empty bins as kids but it's super dangerous, which they also explain in detail in the video). But if you're like this guy doing the video and not familiar with how grain farms work, you might like it too!

At the end, the guy doing the video says he's learned that farmers are good at meteorology, biology, math, engineering and economics. And it's all true, I remember learning a little about all those things from my dad. He's pretty great, I never appreciated how much he was running a small business when he was farming.

Comments

[bunnypip]

When I was a kid there were 1.5 Maths teachers at the school where my mum taught - she was the 1 and the 0.5 was Betty and the rest of the time Betty helped her husband run his farm. Going to visit Betty was one of the highlights of my school summer holidays - partly because she had the most amazing dressing-up box in the attic of her farmhouse and partly because we always got taken out in the combine harvester.

[cosmolinguist]

I loved riding in the tractors too, but the combine was always my favorite. :)

[barakta]

Thanks for sharing this video, loved it. Contextualised how stuff was made with the people and their skills as well as machines.

WOW! Now I can better appreciate the grain silos all around us

[jesse_the_k]

I'm a total city kid. MyGuy grew up on a family farm (working rented land, you can imagine how well that ended up). After their day jobs, his mom and dad would put all the kids in a car in the center of the field, then work the fields til 10p.

Which means I've learned a lot of the horror stories* and not enough of the glorious info and images in this video. The spill of the beans into the hopper is hypnotic.

* (The day his father backed over his sister's head with the tractor. Metal plate, she's fine, the ER wouldn't let him in because he was too muddy.)