Anyone know why a lone, large tree is so often seen in the middle of a field of crops? I’ve noticed this my whole life, and just drove from Kansas to Ohio last week, and yeah, it’s everywhere, so it’s not something I imagined in my misspent youth. Thanks in advance.
It could be a field that gets rotated between crops and pasture. Pastures often have shade trees for the benefit of the cows.
I couldn’t even begin to imagine since I have never seen such a thing in the midwest. I have seen fields planted on both sides of a creek with a tree or two along the creek.
In fact my parent’s farm had such a creek with cottonwood trees along it. The trees were cut down during the 1930’s for firewood and the creek was planted to timothy hay.eventually the farm up the hill also planted their creek to hay. Dirt gradually filled in the creek as it settled because the hay held it back. The creek disappeared and now it is just more farmland.
Natural obstruction: They plow around it always and trees grow up. They clear the brush out and leave a good tree to mature.
Pretty or shade: They like a nice tree and decide a shade tree in the field to rest under should stay. Remember the tree was likely there before tractors. It gets nasty hot in a field. They piled all the field stone around the tree, and now they can’t plant there anyhow.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=378571&highlight=tree+field+farm
Some additional ideas.
There may be a big rock at the base of the tree. Hard to remove, so they let the whole thing sit.
There are a couple of fields like that on my way to work. The lone trees are gorgeous old specimen trees like giant oaks and maples. I would guess they just wanted to keep the tree for function and aesthetics. Most fields don’t have any trees at all however unless there are buildings in them because they take up space and cause equipment problems.
Perch space for hawks, which can keep the mice down? Guessing, here. The other speculations all sound good, too.
Often it’s marginal land that wouldn’t stand up to repeated cultivation without severe erosion, or it’s part of a natural water run.
I had always assumed it was a wind break.
I don’t know about where you live, but in England it is usually the result of combining two or more smaller fields into one as this is more efficient with modern machinery. The tree would have been part of the older, possibly ancient field boundary.
That was my first thought too, but then I wondered if you need a whole row of trees for that.
I am completely dumb?.. I’ve seen trees in crop fields quite a bit where I am from. I always thought the tree was a lightning rod. During a lightning storm , lightning would strike the tree and not the ground, possibly igniting the the entire crop.
How about:
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Convenient reference point when your in the middle of a big damn field.
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Marker for problematic rock outcropping. . . to help avoid potential damage to plow blades, etc.
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Place to ask your midwestern sweety to marry you.
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After you escape from prison after being convicted of the murder of your wife you could use the tree as a place to bury the box that contains the maps and money for your prison buddy to collect after he gets out on parol.
Yes, there are rows of gigantic eucalyptus trees planted as windbreaks in fields near where my parents live in Irivine, CA. They often leave them in for aesthetic reasons when the fields are converted to housing complexes.
Solitary trees will not be windbreaks.
They may be cattle shades .
My FIL had one on the front forty and one on the back forty. The one on the front forty had no rock cairn at the roots, (the one in the back forty did), so I do not know whether the rocks were removed after the tree grew or whether the tree was left to provide shade for cattle. The barn, built around 1900, was definitely a cattle barn, so livestock were on the property when it was started.
Unfortunately, my in-laws bought that farm years after it was built, so we have no way of discovering the origins of the trees.
Chances are, they came from seeds. (Just trying to help!)
But you forgot:
– After your prison buddy doublecrosses you and ties you to a horse, a convenient place to put the noose for when the horse decides to bolt!
Yhey use GPS now.
Maybe. Plow-shares, plow-shares not blades. Cultivators have hinged shares so they will fold back in case of obstructions with a spring to return them. Or they sure used to.