They are lifting the onions! You cut hay, you combine wheat and beans, you pull sugar beets, but you lift onions.
This is farming talk and we are in a farming area. Malheur County Oregon ( west of Boise Idaho) on the Oregon Idaho border produces about 25% of the nation's onions and large amount of other crops as well as being a huge cattle producer.
The trucks are rolling up and down the highways full to the top with onions or wheat or chopped hay or shopped corn (ensilage).
Oregon's restrictive land use laws have worked for one of their purposes, preserving farm ground. In Oregon you can't just buy a piece of land and build a house on it. The land has to be approved for that purpose.
The rule of thumb is tht it takes 600 acres to make a living. That's not easy to come by. Farm and ranch agents always have more buyers (even though they don't necessarily want to pay market price) than they have places to show them, Hence a lot of these deals are done without the availability of the farm being known to others. Right or wrong that's how it works.
And it's global! Markets in other continents can affect our markets which affect the price of an acre of farmground.
We have survived another low water year. just barely.
Just giving you some "food" for thought the next time you have a slice of onion :)
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