B A C K O F T H E M O U N TA I N
O Beautiful... by Roger Kingsley
I
think of the lyrics from “America the Beautiful” whenever I look at this picture. I photographed the scene on our farm one beautiful late summer afternoon using a tripod set up in the bed of my truck. Under those spacious skies, that distant ridgeline is the Armenia Mountain range. The amber waves of grain are cereal rye—one of the most commonly planted cover crops. Farmers typically sow this seed into a field right after the fall corn harvest as a soil and water conservation practice. While most rye is generally terminated the following spring, this particular planting was allowed to go to seed and used as a cash crop grain for more cover crop plantings.
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