Sunrise near Palo Duro Canyon, Texas, December 30th 2011.

Sunflowers facing east toward a rising sun.

Applying cotton harvest aids

A tractor and an airplane spraying two adjacent cotton fields with harvest aids. This is a real photo and I got lucky with the timing. However, since the original shot was quite gray anyway, I used software to turn it to black and white and then restore the original yellow color to the tractor and airplane.

Cotton bolls ready for harvest. The dark areas inside the lint are seeds.

Cotton stripper (harvester) dumping its load in an attendant wagon. The cotton will be taken to the edge of the field and compressed into large modules. These will later be picked up in specialized trucks and hauled to the gin.

Not a pretty photo and taken on a windy, dusty day. These are modules of cotton as brought from the field. The cotton gin is in the background of the photo. Ginning will separate the lint from the seed, bracts, stems etc.

Loading research corn in the hopper for planting.

Spraying miticide in a corn experiment. The yellow suits are quite hot in a Texas summer, so we spray as early in the morning as possible. This made for some nice backlighting on the spray droplets.

Close-up of a sunflower in bloom.

Corn breeder and technician rating corn from the breeding experiments. The goal is to find drought tolerant corn that yields well with less water.

Loading seed corn in the hopper for planting. The green color on the seed comes from a seed treatment that protects the germinating corn from plant pathogens and certain insects.

Young attendees at an agricultural field day.

A front end loader scooping up corn to put in a tractor trailer. This pile of corn originally went as high as the beginning of the white section on the foreword-most tower. This mountain of corn was covered with a heavy plastic tarp for the winter and is being loaded in to trucks in the spring. Olton, Texas.

Learning to drive a tractor in the field.

Pumpkin researcher getting in the Halloween spirit.

Pumpkin researchers loading a trailer after weighing each pumpkin or squash individually.

Spraying research sunflower plots to prevent damage from sunflower moth, a serious pest.

Cotton researchers riding in a custom cotton stripper made to harvest small plots. The photo gives some perspective as to how high off the ground the basket of the stripper is.

Another view of small plot cotton harvest from within a specialized research cotton stripper. The High Plains grows both picker and stripper types of cotton.

Spraying research sunflower plots to prevent damage from sunflower moth, a serious pest.

Taking data in a corn research trial. While not her real name, we call her Carter after the brilliant Samantha Carter in the first Stargate series (SG1).

An assemblage of old windmills at the Wind Power museum in Lubbock, Texas.

A windy day on the highway south of Lubbock. This wind storm had gusts of 70 mph and was able to move tumbleweeds almost as big as cars.

Welding repair on a trailer already loaded with a cotton stripper.

This is a composite of three images shot at sunrise near Cimarron, New Mexico. The technique is called High Dynamic Range (HDR) and uses images that are underexposed, overexposed and properly exposed. The coloration looks a bit like an old post card. This was the first HDR I ever attempted.

Adjusting the wheel width on a tractor. We have to move the wheels when we plant on fields with different row widths. About half the fields are planted on 40-inch rows and half are on 30-inch spacing. It takes about an hour to adjust the wheels - if we are lucky.

Getting suited up to spray miticides on corn research plots. The protective equipment is very hot to wear; safety from the chemicals vs. the risk of heat stroke.

Girl on tractor. There is an altered version of this image in the Velvet Elvises gallery.

Farm kid having fun.

Shaping a ditch to stop irrigation water at the end of a field.

Aerial applicator barely clearing the power lines while spraying a sunflower field. There are not many of these biplanes still in use. They are slower than more modern single wing aircraft, but they can spray in challenging situations where a faster airplane might not be able to.

Setting out the trip wires for using a cone planter to plant small plots of corn. The wire tells the planter where to drop the seed.

Chaining a tractor to a trailer is something that must be done carefully and correctly. This shot is from chilly spring potato planting.

A windy day in potato country. Potatoes grow best in very sandy soil, which of course tends to blow.

Troubleshooting a balky research cone planter in the field.

Planting small research plots of potatoes. The round wheel revolves as the tractor moves forward and the potato seed pieces fall in the hole at the top of the wheel. They then fall through a tube and in to the furrow. This planter is from the early 1950s.

Consultation during spraying corn research plots. The tank on the backpack holds 3 gallons of water and is pressurized by a heavy carbon dioxide tank that is obscured by the water tank in this photo. The backpack weighs approximately 45 pounds when the tank is full.

Some of the colors found in grain sorghum. Most people know sorghum as bird seed, but it is a good cattle feed in the U.S. and is popular as food for people in other nations. Sorghum can be grown with very little water and is an excellent rotational crop for cotton.

Carson National Forest in New Mexico.

Wind turbines at sunset on the southern High Plains. This photo was taken south of Snyder, Texas.

Wind turbines and curious cattle near a playa lake in the Northern Panhandle of Texas.

Putting left over seed corn back in the bag after planting corn.

Fall colors at sunrise south of Fritch, Texas.

Old windmills at the Wind Power Museum in Lubbock, Texas.