What a beautiful sky down on the farm!

Catch the lineup to the right of the back barn.  They were were really keeping an eye on me this morning.  This is another of my driving-into-town-for-a-meeting photos or photos on the fly.  However, unlike the day of the squiggly school bus lights (see March 23rd photo), I had the time today to be calm, to not wave the camera around too much and to even get the correct settings.

This land has only recently been used again as a farm.  The original small brick farmhouse had also long been abandoned and last year it was demolished.  Now there are cattle and goats cohabiting in the barns.

70% of the land in St. Joseph County is farmland and more of it is irrigated than in any other county east of the Mississippi, according to the Michigan State University Extension Service (see the January 7th photo of the irrigated field just down the road from us).  Twenty two percent of all the irrigated land in Michigan is in St. Joe County.  There are 900 some farms and the value of agricultural production is over $93 million a year of which $17 million is from livestock.  The top crops are seed corn, green beans, potatoes, and pickles.  The two million bags of seed corn are used to plant six million acres of commercial corn.  Both Pioneer and Monsanto have seed production facilities in the county.