Whovian (1,627 posts)
A sign of the overwhelming poverty in the rural SE
Last edited Sun Dec 2, 2012, 11:34 PM USA/ET - Edit history (1)
Riding past a soybean field last week but I decided to bring it up now I saw several cars parked by the field and many more people scavenging soybeans that the harvesting machinery had left behind.
They were all bent down on all fours as they sifted through the scrum and dumping their finds into five gallon buckets. I have never seen this before.
It is hard to ride a motorcycle with tears in your eyes.
Boo freaking hoo!!!
If you had any human compassion at all, you would volunteer to HELP those poor folks glean those fields.
I doubt very, very seriously they were picking up the beans from the ground, IF these people even existed. The beans would have been run over many times by trucks, tractors, wagons, etc., and mashed into the ground.
More than likely, they would be looking for any pods still attached to the vines the combine missed. 10-20% losses from mechanical harvesters in not unusual, and most soybean combines have sensors to automatically adjust the header height so it runs as close to the ground as possible.
When I was young we'd walk corn fields after harvesting , pick up the corn for feeding chickens, ducks and geese. That was when they used to pick the corn and let the field sit over the winter.
We would let some friends of ours that kept a few head of livestock pick over the corn fields after we were finished. Sometimes we'd help them, and it wash't unusual for them to gather 2-3 pickup loads of ear corn out of a 40-50 acre field.
