Tolare Farm Show

Tolare Farm Show Donnie Fulks AS, originally uploaded by Donnie Fulks.

Staying with the B/W theme for another couple of posts. I considered submitting this photo to the last club critique, but only three are allowed and I reluctantly left this one out.

I attended a professional conference February before last that included a day at the Tolare Farm Show in California- the largest farm exobition in the world. Thousands of people attend every day to this fantastic event. It is so large it is impossible to see all of the exhibits in one day. I sure tried hard to do so. The food was just as outstanding, but that is another story.

I had thought to give myself a photo project for the fun of it. I wondered how do I tell a story about farm equipment when the place is wall to wall people, as far as the eye can see? After an hour or so I had the idea to take close ups of equipment parts and pieces. I stowed the Nikon and whipped out the iPhone for the ease of creating a story on the fly.

The upper left image is a close up of a forage chopper cutter head. This was on a huge self propelled John Deere model with a 500 plus horse power engine. The upper right shot is of the largest disk blades on a very heavy disk harrow I've ever seen. The blades were close to four feet in diameter. The lower right shows an irrigation pump impeller. This vendor had a cut away model to show their advanced design. Lastly, the lower left image is of a tractor track tread. Most tractors have tires, but the largest models typically offer tracks for better flotation and less compaction that certain conditions warrant.

As the sun was setting we wearily got back on the tour bus. Who knows how many miles we walked that day? The group was going to dinner at a vineyard/reception place. We wondered if we could eat another bite after the two or three tri tip and ribeye sandwiches we devoured at the farm show that day.