A TRAVEL SURPRISE, AND TECHNOLOGIES OLD AND NEW

OVER ONE HUNDRED MILES OF LARGE, PROSPEROUS FARMS ALONG HWY. 29 

LOTS OF CORN STILL BEING PICKED

AND HAULED TO THE GRANARIES

 Thursday, 9:15 AM.  11 degrees F, wind NW, with light to moderate gusts.  It is snowing lightly.  The sky is overcast an there is fog and blowing snow.  The humidity is 73% and the barometer is rising, now at 30.01".
   Our trip from Bayfield to Duluth and on to Wausau and back home was grueling but well worth the effort.
   We started out Tuesday morning in what has become the all-to-familiar lake effect,  white-out blizzard, but once out of Bayfield County it cleared up, and roads and weather were wintry but O.K. until we returned on Wednesday afternoon and we again encountered lake effect conditions from Minaqua north all the way to Bayfield.  By now we are in our winter-survival driving mode...find the cleared lane and stay in it, take it easy, no quick movements and don't pass unless absolutely necessary.
   We drove US Hwy. 53 diagonally SE from Duluth to Chippewa Falls, about two hours through mainly forested country (mostly-oak hardwoods and pine) with a few towns and rivers evident but not much else.  The further south one gets the more often farms pop up in the landscape and the more patchy the forested areas become.  At Chippewa Falls we took Wisconsin Hwy. 29 east, driving about two hours to Wausau, a medium sized city in the center of the state. WI Hwy. 29 is straight east and west all across the state from the St. Croix River western border to Green Bay.  We had never driven the portion we  traveled Tuesday, and were greatly surprised at the scale of the farming all the way.  The farms are large and evidently very prosperous, mostly dairy farms from the looks of them but a lot of mixed agriculture as well.  Corn was still being picked, a highly mechanized operation with corn cobs, leaves and stalks all being chopped and left on the field and corn kernels loaded directly into wagons to be driven by tractor to driers and granaries.  All so much more efficient than what I remember it being as a youth.
   Hwy. 29 is divided, four lane and mostly limited access, one step below an Interstate road, but in many localities there were caution signs regarding Amish buggies on the road.  I find it amazing that the Amish, with horse-drawn equipment and traditional, mostly 19th Century technology, can be profitable enough to purchase what must be very expensive farmland indeed.  I would expect that it is their community oriented, conservative social and economic philosophy that allows them to survive; and the fact that they don't go heavily into debt for modern equipment.  In any case it is good to see archaic  methodologies exist alongside the modern, and and the old knowledge and skills preserved.
   There was a pretty good turnout of city foresters at the Wausau meeting, despite the weather.  The recent find of EAB (emerald ash borer) in Rhinelander, in far northern Wisconsin, has everyone on-edge and looking to see how the problem is being handled.  We had a fine presentation by a new Department of Natural Resources team that is developing ways of handling large amounts of wood from dead urban trees by utilizing modern logging equipment,  and recycling it into saw logs and other products.  To watch their interesting video, just click on http://dnrmedia.wi.gov/main/Play/504a7d15adae42a28a17f7f9614400541d .