What's in your silo?

[Rick Kennerly]

:>
:>So, I ask those of you from farm areas in the US: are grains stored only
:>in granaries? Are silos restricted to silage, or are grains stored there,
:>too?
:>
During my childhood in the 50s, we had grain silos and hay barns in North
Texas.  What soy or sorgram that got shipped out in those days would have
gone to an elevator or grain elevator.  Granary would have been too
high-flown.

Of course high plains dry land cotton was our main crop, stripped from the
stalks by a stripper and carted off in cotton trailers to the co-op, gin or
co-op gin , never cotton gin except when speaking to out--of-town relatives,
where it was ginned (or for ginning) into bales.

Co-op and high plains brings to mind an addendum to a topic that floated on
the surface here this week, populist.  That whole High Plains region from
north Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska was a hotbed of populist, near
socialist, fervor & revolution from the 1880s to the 1930s.  Most of that
region's present day co-ops (cotton gin co-ops, co-op grain elevators, co-op
feed lots, bee co-ops, water co-ops, and electric co-ops) have direct
historical ties to the populist movement of the era--cutting out the
middleman and making their own deals with the vicious railroads.

(That region also spawned many of the populist tunes of Woody Guthrie, who,
while gagging and choking on an Oklahoma dustbowl dust storm so bad that he
and his neighbors could barely see the light bulb hanging in the middle of
the room and  thinking they were going to die, penned the now summer camp
classic --so long, it's been good to know you.  so long, it's been good to
know you.  Certainly, This Land is My Land, would have been the populist
anthem).

rhk