The Corrugator.

     Row-crop farming is pretty self explanatory. It's when you farm your crops in rows and it's how most farming is done around here. Generally (if not always) this is to allow for ease of irrigation. The implement that shapes our world (or county, if you like) into these rows is called a Corrugator.

     It's a bird! It's a plane! Actually it's just a tractor with a corrugator on it. Those of you with a pretty decent grasp on the English language will have already guessed that a corrugator is something that corrugates. What this implement corrugates is the soil.

     Corrugators come in many shapes and sizes. This one has valley-mound points. A valley-mount point creates valleys (the corrugate itself) and mounds (The pushed up areas on the sides of the corrugate). The front part is like a shovel blade (full of dirt, in the above picture) that pulls along under the ground lifting the dirt and cutting anything in the way. The wings in the back push the dirt apart leaving a nice clean corrugate behind it. This one makes five corrugates per pass.

     The arms on the ends raise and lower via hydraulics. They are half the length of the width of the corrugator and have a bladed wheel on the end. What this means is that when you head up the field one way, you can put the arm down and the wheel on the end will cut a clearly visible line that will be directly in the middle of the next pass. To get lots of straight rows, all you have to do is follow the line. (So long as your first pass was straight.)

     "So what's the purpose of all these corrugates?" You might be asking. All row-crop fields have a slight slope to them. We put water into the corrugate and it flows downhill, watering the plants on either side of it. Owyhee County can be a very dry place. The corrugator allows farmers to bring water to large areas of land. Which, in turn, allows the same farmers to provide more of the raw materials and food you use every day.