How about a little agriculture lesson???

We traveled back to northeast Arkansas this weekend to take mom home. I thought I would venture off gardening a little and post about agriculture. After all, where would we be without farmers. Those people work so hard and I admire them so much!!! By the way, did you know Arkansas is the biggest rice producing state in the nation?

Pictured above is a rice field waiting to be cut. Even though I think at this stage it is such a beautiful golden color, I think the early stages of a rice field is gorgeous. It is a deep velvety green that just beckons you to go and roll in it. Of course that would leave you soaking wet because most rice fields are flooded. The flooding is done to help hold down foreign materals, such as weed growth. In this field you can see the levees that help hold the water on the fields.
This is a field that has recently been cut.
After the field has been cut some farmers chose to burn it off. Others elect to leave the chaff. Next year when they go to plant, which may or may not be rice, they will use a no till grain drill and plant down through the chaff. Many farmers will plant rice in the same field two years in a row and then rotate in beans for the next two years.
Here is a picture of a soybean field. Sorry for the blurriness, the picture was taken as we were driving down the road. I just thought it was such a pretty color. These beans are not quite ready to be harvested.
In this field, the beans to the left are not ready for harvest but on the right side they are. After harvesting of soybeans, some farmers will plant winter wheat.
These two last pictures are obviously of cotton. I felt like I was looking at snow covered fields. You can't really see how big these fields were but they were pretty large. I think it's really neat how this ends up being clothes on our back.