Storms

Well, I am sort of recovering from the storms this week. I guess we have been fortunate compared to some. The night before last, we had what the meteorologists call microbursts, I call them mini tornadoes.
We had so many of them around the area that it was frightening. It started several fires in the mountains and I can walk out the door in which I would normally see the valley on one side and the mountains to the right of that, and all I see is a wall of smoke. It's thick and smells like sagebrush.
We lost the top out of 2 of our trees, it cut a huge swath in our elm in the shape of a U and now we have broken branches caught in the branches of the tops of the tree. We have hauled 7 large railroad tie sized branches away already with loads of little twigs as well. The wind is blowing again tonight and there are more branches falling out of the tree that were broken off the other night.

People around us lost more important things than the tops of their trees.

Our neighbor came back from his field to state that his wheel line had been wrapped up and broken in 3 places with one part of it now swimming in the irrigation canal.
I have driven around the neighborhood, and aside from the fire it started in the nearby heights, many people have lost crops such as downed hay fields that look like a giant finger stirred the rows of freshly mowed hay into swirly designs, to cut dry-bean fields that lifted the cut bean plants and deposited them in a lump in the middle of the field.
One neighbor reported that it took the downed hay and rolled it into a giant ball something like a large beach ball.
My mother in-law called to report a sherrif's car with flashing lights blocking traffic from her rural road, she went to see what was going on and the officer said that the wind had picked up a shed and while it deposited it and its contents in the middle of the road safe and sound, the worst was that it snapped the power lines on its way and they were popping around on the ground as they spoke.
The worst of the damage, I believe was near a town about 15 miles from here.
Now, if you've never seen a hop field before this probably won't make sense so I will try to explain a little.
Hops grow on a vine, so in the springtime, there are crews that go out into these large fields and plant poles the size of power lines in the ground every 5 feet or so. Then, they tie all these poles to one another so that they are all connected at the top. This is very important as it keeps the poles steady as the hop vine grows upward and also gives the vine somewhere to go when it reaches the top of it's line.
Next, they plant the hop plant a few feet away from the pole and another crew comes through and places a lead-line right next to the hop and ties it off at the top of the pole. This is what the hop plant will grow upward on, much like a morning glory or a bean plant.
So, you have this giant field FULL of poles and a forest of hop plants.
The wind came up so hard and so strong that it leveled everything in 80 acres, including these hop poles and plants. SO SAD!
There were also people who were harvesting alfalfa seed and when the wind was over, instead of dry plants full of the seed, they had only stems.
It's hard on the farmer when their crops are lost due to natural disaster. It's even harder on them when the economy is the way it is. Diesel is outrageous when you consider all the field work they do is done with diesel tractors, and to have your crop ruined by a storm only adds to the million and one stresses that are upon the American farmer today.
Now, in the Boise valley, there are few farms left...most of them have been bought out by contractors that are ready to build or have already built homes. From one end of the valley to the other there will soon be no farms as the farmer is selling their now very expensive ground to contractors instead of fighting the economy, the free trade agreement and to top it all off, nature. There have been too many droughts, too many storms, too little rain, and too much pressure from the economy for the American farmer to do very well. A few will hang on, I am sure, but most will give way to industrial farming or perhaps their land will grow into another city.
Please, the next time you are in a grocery store, take a minute to look and see just how much is grown here in the USA and remember to pray for the American farmer.