Do you suppose you have intercourse what a cornfield search like ? You do n’t know what a corn field looks like .
Top image : San Luis Valley airy opinion / SUNYUniversity
NASA released a series of picturesshowing the rather odd - transformation of this large pamphlet of Kansan farms , changing their shape from rectangles to circles between 1972 and 2015 ( with stopover in 1988 and 2011 ) .
Image : NASA Visualization Studio , fake color , farm in red
What ’s going on here ? Have Kansas ’ farmers been breaking out the protractors to employ in a four - tenner long troll of orbiter imaging operators ? Not at all .
This is in reality the same thing that ’s been pass off all over the country as America ’s farm very restfully , and with almost no fanfare , whole switch their shape , from neatly - gridded small rectangles to a series of tidy circle .
Why the change?
The transformation has nothing to do with appearance , and everything to do with a change in how we irrigate our farms and the tool we now mostly use to do it : a center pivot irrigation organisation .
A center pin irrigation organization is exactly what it sound like : An automated sprinkler system that pivots around a cardinal point , giving the field a rotary shape . Why did this fussy irrigation scheme set forth to take off about forty class ago , though , and then take over ?
Image : Dalhart Texas , NASA Visualization
The center pivot man irrigation system is really passably old . It ’s been around since the 40s . Farmers did n’t start really using them on a bombastic - scale , though , until tenner later – and for good rationality . The earliest role model weregiant steel contraptionsmade of a serial publication of enkindle sprinklers , supported on towers . They were crazily heavy , easily broken , ridiculously complex to doctor , and not very good at sprinkling water evenly .
Bythe late 60s , however , manufacturers had count on out how to make them lighter , simpler , and more standardised . and over the next decennary James Leonard Farmer speedily get adopt them . By tapping the systems direct into groundwater , husbandman were suddenly able to almost totally and easilyautomate irrigation from deep wells .
Image : NASA Visualization
Today , there areover 34 million Akko of crops in the U.S. irrigatedby some variety of sprinkler organization — and just under 28 million of those are irrigated by a center pin irrigation organization . That ’s over half of the total55 million American acresthat are irrigated at all .
Wait, how have I not noticed this?
So how did the transformation from public square to circle take place for the most part unnoticed — unless you bechance to be very , very high up ? Because , while from space they may look like an insanely - complicated secret plan of Connect Four , at the ground - level inwardness pin irrigation systems count like this :
Image : Center Pivot Irrigation organisation in action / USDA flickr
If you ’re watching from high up , it ’s not hard to see that the configuration of the fields has totally commute . But if you ’re on the ground , seeing those circular shapes you see in the artificial satellite picture is much heavy . First , because the round fields are stretched to the very limit of the straight plot of country that they usually still occupy — make the curvature too big for your oculus to take in all at once .
But it ’s also a trick of the middle . Inside of those circles , the unbent wrinkle of the farm , and the grid that the industrial plant are repose out on appear , fundamentally , the same as they ever were — and that ’s because they mostly are . It ’s just the way we irrigate those farm that has change .
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