New York: Day 4

New York: Day 4

A visit to the farm

Today we paid a long overdue visit to my uncle's house and one of my cousin Emory's farms. They live about 2 hours away from my Grandma's house (up here they measure distance in hours).  It is a very long, boring and monotonous drive through flat country and quaint little podunk towns, with peeling paint and collapsed barns. I couldn't make this drive by myself. It's too long and not exciting enough to keep me alert.

On the way there we saw an interesting sky phenomenon.  Sometimes cited by quacks on the internet as signs of UFOs, this is called a Fallstreak hole.  Water droplets in a cloud crystallize into ice faster in one area than the clouds around it, thus the weird 'hole' punched in the sky.

"Look! An alien mothership just disappeared!" - said no scientist ever.

This is not the first time I have seen bizarre cloud patterns in upstate New York.  Check out this super cool optical effect I saw once, on a day when it was 10 degrees below zero. A prismatic halo around the sun.

Picture taken January 1, 2013

(The above effect only happens on days when it is below zero at high altitudes.
Moisture in the clouds turns to tiny ice crystals, which refract the sunlight
into a rainbow spectrum when the sun shines through it.
I've seen this before in other places, but not anywhere near this dramatic)

We arrive at the dairy farm. This farm is only being rented through the winter. It has over 200 cows which are the chief milk supplier for Byrne Dairy which stocks grocery stores all over the region (the place where Grandma always bought her milk) Needless to say, it's an impressive operation.

We drove up the long dirt road to get to the farm right as my Uncle drove a tractor in front of us. He's pulling a grain spreader to these two barns across the field where the maternity ward and the calves are.

Inside this corn crib is about six tons of corn grain. My Uncle says these cow eat about 2 tons a day.

And here's the moneymakers.

This is what the farm uses instead of silos. Long trenches of poured concrete,
with grain pushed into it by bulldozers. Then the pile is covered
by a plastic sheet and weighed down by hundreds of spare rubber tires.
I asked him where the tires come from. He tells me the gas stations
and car repair places throw away tons of defective or punctured tires,
they just give these to him for free by the truckload.

Finally, the Byrne Dairy tanker truck comes in to load up hundreds of gallons of milk.