windrows to dry before being packed up and removed from the field. Either may be baled into big blocks or cylinders for storage and distribution. Those bales wrapped tight in white plastic are actually silage, which can also be made by piling green vegetation into silos or trenches. This process preserves the material by fermentation, which maintains greater nutrient value than allowing it to dry.* In cold northern places like Upstate NY and parts of the Upper Midwest (where dairy is king), maize is often grown for silage. Silage maize is harvested whole before the grain is fully mature. This captures much of the energy of maize grain where seasons are not reliably long and warm enough to get the more valuable fully mature grain product.
stacks. I think it's a testament to our culture's agrarian past that all of us are familiar with these stacks as passed down in children's stories. In his classic DIY grain gardening book, Gene Logsdon describes how his family used to create these stacks (with the help of their neighbors) and how the stack played a central role in the life of the farm year round - for both people and livestock.
painting demonstrates how fun the use of such relatively primitive tools probably was.
barley field by my apartment transformed to straw. A combine harvester combines cutting and cleaning the grain: reaping, threshing and winnowing. The most sophisticated (and incredibly expensive!) combine models can harvest huge amounts of grain, storing it in a bin and dropping finished bales of straw. In modern industrial ag, some farmers have left their own fields to become professional combine owner-operators, traveling throughout the U.S. grain belt, selling their services to farmers who can't afford to own and maintain their own combines.
The grain was poured into some waiting trucks (spilling only a little). Straw was left behind in windrows (and presumably baled up later - but I left town before I saw it).
Returning on the trail to my apt, this deer crashed by me on its way from one woods to another.
* One of the reasons those plastic wrapped bales have become popular is that you don't need to maintain a silo (or move the hay back and forth from it). I've heard that the fermentation process also increases the protein content of hay, but wikipedia seems to dispute this.
** Some more reading on how to grow your own hay
*** There's a real science to knowing what kind and richness of hay to feed animals at different times of the year to keep them healthy, but I don't know the details.
**** I know there's U.S. regional variation in the phrase "putting up hay" to refer to harvesting and storing hay, but I can't remember or find it now...