One of our fields rests alongside the Wabash River. It’s a long crescent shape and you can’t see both ends of it at the same time, even if you’re out in the middle. We have to move our equipment down a lane cut into a hillside (done before my time by wife’s grandfather) that drops 100′ from top to bottom over a short distance. We don’t take the semi trucks down there because it would very difficult or impossible to bring them back out even partially loaded. We just use the grain cart, and it doesn’t get filled all the way. The tractor gets a decent workout pulling it back up the hill.
Once at the bottom, you are below all the trees and can see the river when through them when they thin out. It’s pretty isolated down there and quite scenic as well. Adding to the scenery is a group of bald eagles that have been living down there for several years now. I wasn’t able to snap a good picture of one, but they were flying over me at harvest this year. I was afraid they had gone since I didn’t see them in the spring, and one tree they nested in had fallen into the river.
Anyway, enjoy my pictures of the journey down to the field and back! By the way, and eight row corn head is a tight fit in a couple spots. Any wider and it would have to go down on the trailer and not on the combine.
Looks like southern In….
Northern!
Looks like southern In…..
Looks quite a bit cleaner than a southern Indiana river bottom. I have acreage on the river some protected by levee and some not (a bend); and we haven’t been able to even plant it the last two years – even for late-season beans. Thankfully, there’s crop insurance.
There are several fields between Lafayette and Delphi along 25 that are very low and along the river. They flood out completely at least once every year. Under feet of water for days or weeks at a time. I don’t know how that ground keeps getting farmed.
We manage; even though the farm floods at least once a year. Historically about one crop year in six is affected; but it seems to be getting worse. The ‘bend’ that we farm outside the levee has been farmed for centuries now. It was said to be a plot that the Piankashaw band of Miamis farmed when they came down to Vincennes about 1732. The ‘bend’ was even broken up into various plots in the early 1800s and farmed by different people. Around the turn of the century the Savoree family (for whom the bend is named) owned it all and lived out there. I found a 1910 flood story about the family loading up everything on a barge animals and all and floating down to Vincennes where they tied up. I imagine the 1913 flood wiped them out.
We manage ok, we got a bean crop in even after the worst flood in 2008 that broke levees down here on the Illinois side (the Illinois levee breaks probably helped). But 2010 and 2011 there was just too much rain throughout June and into July. One flood crest would follow another; and it does seem that the flooding is getting worse. Wish you all upriver would no-till!
I’m working on it!
We went to the surveyor’s office today to locate some tile lines in one field that is almost 280 acres. The aerial photos were pretty old. Whenever they were taken that field was a dozen fields.
Brian,Have you ever driven on 225 between old Rte 25 & Battleground?THat road east of The Wabash is notorious for flooding
It sure is. The new Hoosier Heartland highway is so much better for us hauling grain to Lafayette now. People don’t realize the needs of a 40 ton truck trying to get up and down all those hills. They pull out in front of you and go too slow to let you make a run at the hill when loaded. The new road eliminates all but one hill just South of Delphi.