One of the fics I was reading tonight got me thinking about some of the specialized jargon that farmers, especially Kansas farmers, might use. I'm a little out of date on this--it's been 22 years since I moved east from Kansas City--but I remember a few terms that people had to explain to a city girl like me when I was out in farm country, hours away from Kansas City. For example, the first time I heard someone refer to a "honey wagon," they had to explain that it was a manure spreader. And of course everyone knows that the local "elevator" is the place you sell your grain. "Corn" is field corn, "beans" are soybeans, "hay" is usually cut and dried alfalfa, and "silage" is what you get when the cut corn stalks are put into an airtight silo to ferment for cattle feed. (If you store your corn or wheat to sell, you put it into a grain bin, which is not airtight.) Winter wheat is planted in the fall and harvested in the spring; spring wheat is planted in the spring and harvested in the summer. A section of land is a square mile, 640 acres. If someone farms a quarter-section, that is a 160-acre field. A pivot is an irrigation pivot; it turns in a circle, so a square field often contains an irrigated circle of corn and dry corners. Since the land in much of the state was originally laid out by the section (it looks like a checkerboard from overhead), it is not unusual to have someone give directions to their farm as "go north out of town for five miles, then go one mile east and then two miles north."
If you raised cattle, they would probably be beef cattle, and you would sell them by taking them to a sale barn, where they would be sold at auction.
I could start talking about food--for example, "dinner" was the meal in the middle of the day, and "supper" was in the evening--but I seem to remember a thread that already covered that topic.
If I haven't bored you already, I thought it might be interesting to have people post terms that someone like Lois might not understand, to either give an explanation of what they mean or request one. Any takers?
