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Published: August 12th 2012
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I haven’t felt inspired to write much lately except in my diary. Not sure why except I guess it has been very routine here of late.
We have finished the wheat harvest and have been doing lots of maintenance and those jobs that get left in the rush of harvest.
Right now I’m sitting in the Scale House at a feedlot called Avi Lanche about 10 miles North of Dalhart. I am recording the weights of the loaded trucks as they make their way from the 2 fields we are cutting to the pile. When the trucks come onto the scales it goes dark in the Scale House they are so big they block out the sun. Thank goodness I have air conditioning in here!! The building is about 2 m square so it wouldn’t take long to get really hot in here especially when I am cooking corn samples to calculate the dry matter content. Luxury really.
So far today I have recorded133 loads and we have about an hour to go before we finish. At 25 tons a load that is about 3,300 tons across the scales today.
I have my computer with me so
Scale House Interior
This is after I cleaned it out! Had air conditioning which was especially when I was cooking samples of chopped corn to get moisture readings. I have recorded all of the stats on a spreadsheet and loaded 3 other jobs that we have also completed.
My return to NZ is destined to take place on the 8
th October. The plan ( at the moment) is to catch up with family before heading to Australia to get my licenses and drive a truck hopefully in South Australia. I think I have had my fill of a desert environment and so when I return to the USA, I would like to work in a different environment, perhaps a greener location near a big city.
Day 2 in the Scale House. Things were really busy this morning with 2 choppers going and 8 trucks coming at me. Those truck drivers!!!! They call me all sorts of very unpleasant names because I’m the scale "bitch". Well they say worse than " bitch" so I am just going to rise above it and refuse to play their game. I reckon they are just jealous because I get to be here and they are there. I feel sorry for them really. Poor relics of humanity that they are. Not all of them are like that. Some are fine examples of humanity but they are not the ones that come with terribly derogatory names for me. Aweful people really but don't worry I will get them back for their blasphemous naughtiness. I will, I will.....I will!! Oh what's the point. It's just not worth it, revenge that is. No I was right the first time. Rise above it Nigel. Turn the other cheek.
All good fun if you haven't picked that up. Guys only abuse each other when they like them (in fun that is). So the more abuse they dish out towards you, the more they like you. Ok what is the alternative?
"I really like you Nigel. Love your hair Nigel. You look great today, what have you been doing, what was his name 😉."
Nah, doesn't work for guys. Better to abuse them. "How are you you ugly piece of s**t? It's bad bastards like you that make the world go round. F*** you, yeah well F*** you too" yeah that works 😊
CHANGE OF SUBJECT MATERIAL
For sometime now I have been pondering how to calculate the area of the circles we cut. Then I heard someone explaining that Texas is cut up into square mile blocks and the roading pattern more or less follows the block pattern.
So it’s a mile between the roads like County Road R and County Road S. Note: Some of this is really obvious but it's more about connecting the dots
Now a big circle is a mile across (diameter) and fits into the roading pattern. Simple really. People talk about these big circles as being about 500 acres in size with 17 to 18 sprinkler towers from thr pivot out to the circumference.
So the area calc is π*r^2.
There are 5280 feet in a mile (Form 1 in primary school is where I remember that from).
So the radius is half 0f 5280 ft.If there are 17 towers in the sprinkler then I can now calculate the area of land between the sprinkler towers.
So here’s a question. How would we know when we are over half way when cutting an eight-tower circle (commonly known as a 125acre circle)?
Oh by the way, four circles with 8 towers irrigators (125 acres) fit into a square mile.
I can now tell you that when we work out from the pivot we have cut half of the area of the field when we are half way between the 5
th and the 6
th tower. Or from the outside in, it is the same.
The reason that I have not connected the dots until now is because I was trying to do the calculation from the pivot outwards by measuring the distance between towers NOT from the big picture. The big picture view gives a clearer perspective than the small view. Wow, that was deep!
The same amount of wasteland (known as corners) occurs regardless of the size if the circle. For example, four 125 acre circles or a 500 acre circle occupy the same area which is rather obvious. So is it more cost effective to farm these big circles including all of the machinery and capital cost of the gear? Leave that one with me and see what I can find out.
SLIGHT CHANGE OF SUBJECT
This water thing is a time bomb here. I heard on National Radio that over 90%!o(MISSING)f all the water is used in Texas is used for agricultural purposes. I met a guy the other day that works as a drill operator drilling for water. I asked him how deep do they go for good water. I nearly fell over when he said 2,000 feet! The last I heard it was 750 feet. Maybe I was talking to the wrong guy? Who knows? One thing for sure, the current water usage doesn’t look as if it is sustainable in the long term. Another person told me that the calculations are that the aqifer below us is mind bogglingly large but at the current rate will be exhausted in about 20 years. Is this the 21st century where we are s'posed to have an understanding of sustainability or is this still the dark ages where you grab as much as you can while you can before it all runs out.
I just wonder if these people will ever develope any form of environmental concience. I wonder if they will one day realise that they are destroying the goose that lays the golden egg. I wonder if they will wake up one day and see themselves and part of the problem and perhaps part of the solution. These people are good people, no question but somehow the collective conciousness does not include taking personal responsibility for their impact on the land and environment around them.
As Buckminster Fuller put it " Spaceship Earth." We are all on the space ship together so we all have an impact like it or not. Collectively we have come to know that fact in our very being or we will destroy our precious Spaceship, Earth.
Like I've said before, America, a land of contradictions.
Bye for now my fellow spaceship travellers where ever you are.
Nigel.
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