If you know that you have a road every mile, you can skip one road, and go 4 miles while they go 2. That is a lot more practical.
[USER=50]@Holy Cow[/USER]
FARMERS: Someone Has to Feed You People
I have a couple of ways I can go home from the office, one is a Farm to Market road that has grown up with the dreaded suburbia. It's bad enough to try to drive the highway at 60mph (the posted limit) and have cars pull out from their "residential" street at 40, cause that's how they grew up doing it in the city. But it's really frustrating to get behind a line of 8 or 10 cars and SUVs stuck behind a smallish tractor going down the Farm to Market road, no traffic coming as far as the eye can see, a broken yellow center stripe, but these folks forget they can pass!
And don't forget, the guy on the tractor or combine doesn't want to be there any more than you want him to be there. Trying to get between fields down a 16' road with an 18' piece of equipment is no easy task without traffic, much less with. Mailboxes are especially tough. Not long ago I started seeing what looked like somebodies mail strewn along the road in a few places. A little ways up the road was a mechanics truck pulling a disk with 3-4 mailboxes hanging off the rear gang.
"Traction to pull that enormous disk set for 18" deep thru bare land".
Here is the Alabama law:
http://yellowhammernews.com/faithandculture/alabama-troopers-warn-left-lane-drivers-youre-breaking-law/
Here is California's version - in typical governmentese.
Holy Cow, post: 400801, member: 50 wrote: Four reasons.
That 250+ horsepower is primarily dedicated to moving soil, not speed. That translates into tons of steel attempting to insert itself to the proper depth into the soil to rearrange it into a better seedbed and over a width of 40 to 60 feet at as fast a ground speed as is feasible for the specific tillage function.
Second, soil compaction is a bad thing. Those who study soil mechanics learned decades ago how wheel loading impacts the depth to which the soil is compacted, which can be deeper than the standard tillage depth. This causes poorer moisture absorption and poorer migration of nutrients at all depths. The long term result is decreased crop production. The alternative is a slow and costly tillage operation known as deep ripping. The best soil medium for root growth must be maintained.
Third, it improves the odds of turning that bad snake in the road into a good snake.
Fourth, it forces those who get caught behind one of these on a narrow road to think, at least briefly, about where food comes from. It doesn't magically appear from thin air in the back rooms of the grocery stores.
My hometown! http://bigrockplowingmatch.com/
Wow! Big Rock, Illinois. I see from Wikipedia that Kane County is home to over 70 forest preserves. Where does one find ground to plow?
It has been about 40 years since I drove through that area so the memory is quite fuzzy. As I recall there are vast amounts of prime farmland between Moline and Elgin. Must be a few trees thrown in for diversity.
