The wind picked up out of the east this morning, damp and chilly. I'd had this curious dream of driving a combine with a corn head on and hitting all sorts of vehicles and buildings with it and I just knew something was going to happen, but I wasn't sure what.
I resolved a nagging customer issue in Illinois around 11:00 and by noon I was out the door, driving north and west to do a little bit more work in Shelby County, Iowa. I'd been fooling around with this particular problem for the last two months, then the network operator decided he wanted to go six times faster along with fixing the problem and we're off to the races, with a new switch and a network tune up.
I had actually started to despair a little bit on this series; it really seemed like I wasn't going to get any further west than Des Moines, Iowa, but I've been freed to roam again.
(update: There are lots of new folks because of the election and they might be seeing my work for the first time. I often write in a series format so if you like this one you can look back just a page or two and find the first seven.)
Shelby county is very rural, despite having interstate 80 right through the middle of it. This road is picturesque but not that unusual for the area. Do you understand the three tiered hierarchy of Iowa gravel roads? Ones with houses and school bus routes get plowed in the winter and maintained in the summer, the ones with field driveways and no houses get summer maintenance and they're left to drift full in the winter, and those with neither houses nor field access are relics from a time when farms were much smaller. They still have field driveways but they're not used any more except by the occasional hunter.
The land has more hills than home but it's just as empty ... and surprisingly enough the ground is just as fertile if you want to try Iowa's newest cash crop.
I saw them in the distance and once I got closer it became obvious – they're along the interstate and it's a a broad, smooth ridge, a good 50' to 75' higher than the land to the northwest, the direction of the prevailing winds.
I'd heard they were not yet complete and I wasn't disappointed when I arrived. The right is up but not yet commissioned, the center turbine was completed earlier in the day, and the first of three sections is up on the left.
Oh, wait! Just as I was driving away I noticed this – tower section number two going up on the unfinished one.
There are a hundred planned turbines at this location and it looked like most of them are already up. The turbines themselves cost about $4,000,000 each and the installation cost is not insignificant. I think Shelby county got themselves a half a billion dollars in taxable property here. Every ten turbines requires a pair of technicians for maintenance and there is usually a managerial team lead to go with them. An installation of this scale created twenty five jobs with a starting wage of $16 to $17 per hour, which is counted as a damn good living in a place where an expensive house might run $60,000.
We Iowans are not a fancy lot for the most part. Things tomorrow are probably going to be much like things were yesterday. The nation gets swept up in a boom and we go up a little bit, the boom unwinds and the young folk who went off to work it come limping home, but not all that much changes. Well, that's how the crash of 1987 and the dotcom bubble played out here ... but this banking stuff might just be a little different.
Agriculture is a huge component of this state's economy. A square mile of land here sells for at least $3,000,000 and perhaps as much as $4,100,000 if it's right next to an existing holding. That much land might produce 160,000 bushels of corn worth as much as $800,000. A typical farmer's cooperative might cover 300 square miles, with 70% of the land under cultivation, and the annual crop value would be somewhere between $100,000,000 to $200,000,000. That coop will have a holding tank with twenty five hundred tons of ammonia, like the one seen below, with a current market value of $2,500,000 and, comparable amounts of phosphate and potassium fertilizers on hand.
These are large, financially complex operations subject to risk from the weather and the commodities market. And now they're subject to banks that are drowning in bad debt, which forces them to limit their fertilizer inventories and liquidate their crop holdings for less than maximum return. Our banks are less adventuresome than the ones in the areas where the housing bubble is the worst, but every bank was holding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac thinking they were a sure thing. Sadly, they were not.
I can't say exactly where all of this is headed. Peak oil and global warming lend themselves to doomsday scenarios being explored. I'm as grim as I am because I'm an engineer and I do worst case estimates - and most of those involve a whole lot of people starving globally if we don't extract our collective head from our collective hindquarters regarding the importance of ammonia production, both as a fertilizer and a fuel. I hope for their sake people are starting to listen ...