Around Here

Around here, it looks like harvest season is rolling in. Activity at the grain silo's is picking up - a fellow stationed up on the weigh bridge all day, trucks arriving from 8am until 6pm in the evening with their grain deliveries. It's a pretty huge operation, really. I think we're still a little while off the full swing of harvest, and I expect it to get busier and louder (apparently the trains shunting around at night can get really loud, but I sleep through anything other than the sounds of a toddler). It's not bothering me at the moment. Maybe it will when it picks up, maybe it won't. 

I find it kind of fascinating, really. Industrial scale agriculture. I did vintage at a winery for a few years there, and I loved that job and that work. Little people operating big machines and managing big volumes of grapes from the harvest. So I see the similarities in the operation across the road - the fellow  in high vis gear, hanging about on the weigh bridge, overseeing as the trucks dump their loads and then waiting, kicking at the ground with a steel-capped boot, for the next truck to roll in. And repeat, lots of times.

And then a part of me despises industrial agriculture. I dislike the use of semi trailers and their natural-resource-guzzling ways, I dislike the idea of intensive monoculture farming, and this business whereby farms these days are owned by corporations, not farmers, well I'm not a huge fan of that either. But this is the world we live in. And I suspect that most of the grains that pass through this area are destined to go to the port and be shipped off to other parts of the world. Funny that we have such a good view of the whole thing.

I guess this will be our front of house view for the next couple of months. I have no complaints. The trucks, they rumble past so slowly as they're just taking off. It's when they go through small towns carrying too much speed, that's when they bother me. That really bothers me.