Amber Waves of Grain?

Having grown up in the city, to me a farm means chickens, cows, sheep, horses, vegetables, grains, a fruit orchard and a farm house. It also includes a farmer.  Those of us who live anywhere near the Amish can't be blamed for having such notions because Amish farms are something like this.  So are the very few remaining family farms, like the ones you see in some places in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (these are the places that I know best).  In the farm belt (which I consider to be Western PA, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, etc...) the farm as I know it is nowhere to be seen. This was most apparent in Wisconsin.  I put several posts on Facebook asking "where are you people hiding the cows?"  This state is well known for it's dairy industry. We saw a total of about 30 cows in the western most part of the state.  What we saw instead of cows was not even empty pasture lands.  In fact, from I-90, one can see no pasture land at all.  There are two things you can see, corn and to a lesser extent soybeans.  In every single state we drove through, corn is all you can see. The saddest part of all this is that the corn is not even edible. It is the corn that will be used for the additives to packaged food and gasoline. The most prime farmland in the entire world, the American Midwest, is being wasted on corn and soybeans--which no person will ever eat except as high fructose corn syrup, corn maltodextrin etc. Some of it is also probably being grown for chicken and beef feed. This is the world's bread basket?

On to South Dakota, which is beef country. Here, there are cattle in every pasture.  I know that they go to a confinement lot before you eat it to be "finished" on corn, but for the majority of their life, they are roaming on the open prairie ranches.  The fact that these ranches have all but decimated the native bison is a separate issue, the cattle at least are living like cattle should.

So this begs the question, where the heck are these amber waves of grain? In a trip across the farm belt that took days, we did not see one single solitary farm growing wheat.  I read somewhere that the majority of wheat these days comes from Russia. In the political world right now many pundits are calling for and end to our dependence on foreign oil. I tend to agree with these folks--we should drill our own oil if we want to use so much--and we should have to put up with the environmental degradation that goes along with that.  I would like to argue that we should also try to end our dependence on foreign wheat and foreign vegetables and foreign meats. Such a plan would require that we reclaim the bread basket of the nation from the corn agribusiness that has quietly taken that away from us over the years.  A nice start would be ending--yes totally ending--farm subsidies. People have a misguided idea in their heads that farm subsidies are at least helping family farmers and that makes it somewhat more palatable. Not so. Farm subsidies, should be called what they are, agribusiness subsidies.

In answer the question of where the cows are in Wisconsin, a friend on Facebook (who lives in WI) told me that 10 minutes from her house they are building a confinement lot that will hold 4,500 cows.   My guess is this is where all the dairy cows are these days, in confinement lots, where they get no pasture, no time outside and their manure has to be stored in manure lagoons which emit an ungodly smell.  In their pasture lands--which I think are rightfully theirs, their is high fructose corn syrup growing.

Since most people don't actually drive through the flyover much, I think they don't realize what is going on out here. I wonder if we'll ever see the day when a candidate runs for president on a platform of ending farm subsidies. I wonder if the incentive to grow all of this corn was gone what would happen?

The long drive

We have gone a long way since I last posted. It is Sunday morning and we are in South Dakota just outside of Mount Rushmore.

After we left Corry, we drove to Elkhart Indiana.  We spent the night there and had late night hamburgers in a Midwestern hamburger chain called Steak and Shake.  They say that American towns all look the same--everyone has McDonald's, Applebee's and all of the other junk chains, but there are some regional differences and this place is one of them.  Good burgers and the skinniest french fries you've ever seen. One difference at Steak and Shake is table service and being open 24 hours.  The kids that work there, take your order and deliver to your table just like a proper restaurant. We rolled in about 11pm, so it was a late night crowd, mostly teenagers in to get some junk after a movie and other travelers getting some late night grub; not a lot of small kids.  Right after our food was delivered, some poor kid back in the kitchen dropped a tray of glassware and the sound of shattering glass was deafening.  Of course the whole restaurant started cheering and clapping, (the Cipollas were the loudest clappers and cheerers, I'll admit.) As the cheering died down, there was a sliver of silence before conversations picked back up, and in that tiny second, Marianne shouted out as loud as she could "You're FIRED!!" 

The next day we pulled out of Elkhart early because we had a LONG way to go. We made it as far as Rochester, Minnesota and we camped at a very nice campground there.  I had a chance to get a few things done in the morning before the kids woke up, then we got on the road. 

We went over the Missouri river and we were amazed to see that the river is still well flooded beyond its banks. I have never seen so much water in South Dakota, in addition to the river being flooded, all of the stock tanks on the ranches are overflowing with water, and there is water pooled in every imaginable place. If you were a crazy person you might think the inland sea was coming back.  The drive across South Dakota in the dark was amazing. There was a severe thunderstorm going on northwest of us and because it was the prairie, we had an amazing view of the lightening bolts for about an hour and a half.  It was the most amazing light show ever.  It was just Chris and I in the car that night and he is very vigilant about looking out for tornadoes, and he kept saying, "mom, that really looks like a funnel and it looks like it's moving." I had Chris get on the Weather Channel app on the iPhone and the severe weather alert didn't mention a tornado, but no sooner had he read me the alert then on the radio we get an emergency broadcast about high winds, quarter sized hail, life threatening lightening, and yep, you guessed it, tornado watch. Luckily for us, we were South enough of the storm system not to have to worry about it, because we were after all, trailing a tornado magnet on the back of Charlie's car.

Prairie Grass in Badlands. Photo taken by Marianne Cipolla.

Claire hiking in the Badlands. Photo taken by Charles Cipolla.

We spend the night in a town called Kadoka and we could see the effect of the rains on this prairie, it is verdant green out here.  Badlands looked all the more magnificent with the variegated rocks and the green prairie grasses. We are lucky we visited when we did, I would imagine in a dry year, the park would look very different.

Today our plan is to go to Mount Rushmore and I hope Wind Cave and maybe we will drop by Deadwood if we have a chance.  There is so much to see in this area.

We will likely be changing our travel plans a bit from here on out.  We were planning a trip to Yellowstone, but the fact is we are running out of time, we need to be in Phoenix in time to pick up keys, pay the rent and move in to the new house before Charlie has to go back to work. We are still hashing out what route we will take from here, but we are in Rapid City for at least one more night.

I am going to do a separate post on my thoughts about the farm belt, now that we've just driven through it a good portion of it. Keep an eye out out for it if you are interested in some thoughts about what is supposed to be the "breadbasket of the world."

Fire and Dynamite in Corry, PA!

This morning I am posting from the Harecreek Campground in Corry, PA. We have a gorgeous campsite with lots of grass and a shade tree.  We arrived last night around 5pm.  What took so long?  Well, we did not leave on Sunday until around 7pm, so we drove to the Poconos and decided to stop for dinner. As good luck would have it, there were fireworks and live music going when we arrived. Chili's was still open so we went in to have some food and they gave us what turned out to be the best seat in the house.  We were next to a window that was situated perfectly for watching the fireworks.  After dinner we kept going until Danville, PA where we stopped for the night at a motel.  I must stop here and do some shameless bragging; the dog has been amazingly well behaved on this trip. I was worried that his stomach would be upset and he would bark too much.  His tummy is a bit upset (he didn't want to eat too much the first two days), but he has been very well behaved and has kept the barking to a minimum. He is very curious about every new site we go to, and of course we have been taking him with us  everywhere we go.  He was facinated by the fireworks in the Poconos, the noise startled him at first, but watching colors explode all over the sky made it worth it for him. He couldn't take his eyes off them.

Camping at Harecreek in Corry, PA

Look at all this shade!

We continued our drive through the Pennsylvania Wilds yesterday--which I wish we had some time to explore. The PA Wilds really do have a lot of interesting things to see, and unfortunately we just barreled on through to get up to Corry.  We ate a quick dinner last night after arriving and then headed over to my sister Nancy's house to hang out by a giant bonfire and my nephew Vince set off a bunch of firecrackers.  The kids loved it.  Some of the fireworks were homemade. Charlie reminded Vince, "you know dude, if you had say 5 of these things and strapped them to your jacket, people would get the wrong idea..."  Despite all of the exploding noises, after the dog had a chance to get a good sniff of everyone, he settled right down and didn't make a sound all night. After every single bang Claire shouted "That was so awesome!"

We ended the night with some of the worst ghost stories ever told followed by some of the worst riddles ever posed.  A huge thank you to Nancy, Bernie, Vince, Gina and baby Luca for having us over for a visit. The kids will remember that night at Aunt Nancy's for a very long time!

We are here in Corry for another night. We are going to visit my parents today and we are grilling beef ribs for dinner and there will probably be some swimming in the pool.  We are still debating what to do next.  We had been planning the Wisconsin Dells, but we found out online that it just a bunch of waterparks and there is no hiking in the actual Dells (which are a series of glacially formed limestone canyons--which is what we would actually want to see.)  So the decision that has to be made is this: do we stop in the Dells anyway since it is midway and spend a few days and camp, or do we just stop midway somewhere between here and South Dakota for the night an then just head there? There is also the issue of the weather, there are both storms and fire outwest which we want to avoid.  I'll keep you posted.

Welcome to the new Cipollas on the Move blog. We are keeping the blog, as we always do when we are on a major trip with the kids. This time, we are actually moving as well. After over 2 years in New Jersey, we have decided to move back to Phoenix. We are doing things a little differently this time around. Instead of driving a uHaul, we have loaded up uBoxes (similar to PODS, but significantly cheaper), and now uHaul will ship the boxes to Phoenix for us. By doing this, we now have two drivers of cars. Charlie will drive the Yukon with the camper, and I will be driving the Honda with the dog. Yes, that is another change; this time we have a dog to take with us on the trip. Bo has never been on one of our epic journeys, so this will be a big adjustment for him. This is old hat for the cats; based on prior experience, I'm anticipating about 20 minutes of adjustment time for Pounce and Echo. In no time, Echo will be chilling on the dashboard watching the scenery go by.

Our plan was to leave this morning. We are, no surprise, already way off schedule. We woke up to a torrential downpour, and not having watched the news lately, we had no idea this was coming. So we quickly did the things we had to do on the camper and we now are taking our time because of the foul weather. We still have some odds and ends to deal with, the propane tanks need filling, the fridge and freezer still need filling and then there is the issue of us having no place to spend the night because of the holiday weekend. The bad weather might have ruined a few camping plans, so I will call the first campground on the itinerary and see if anyone is bailing out because of the weather, othewise we can squat on federal lands somewhere in the PA Wilds--which for the law-abiding among you readers--isn't really breaking any rules because my taxes have paid for my stay.

So, the itinerary for this trip is essentially as follows (and readers of my other travel blogs know we don't adhere to our own plans all that strictly, so don't hold me to this):

• Corry PA-To visit my parents
• Wisconsin Dells-I have no idea what is there, I need to look this up
• South Dakota (Mt Rushmore, The Badlands and the Caves)
• Yellowstone and Teton
• Utah-Going to visit the major parks that aren't too hot this time of year.
• Arizona--Might swing by a few sites before we head for Phoenix

We still have a few things to work on before we leave, I'll post another post when we get wherever we end up today (that is if there is any internet access--and readers of my blogs, know I often compose posts in remote locations and uplaod them the next time we can get internet access.)

I hope everyone is having a nice July 4th weekend wherever you are!