Farmers across Kansas began on Saturday to plant their fields in a single continuous line stretching from the Colorado border to Missouri, a project organized by the state's agricultural cooperatives to spell out their verdict on two years of the Trump administration before Tuesday's midterm elections.
Cooperative spokesman Dale Ruhnke said the plan was adopted at a meeting in Hutchinson after growers concluded that a simple vote was insufficient. « We have been told for two years that the market is strong and then we are told to wait, » he said. « So we are going to wait in rows that you can see from space. »
The furrow, roughly 430 miles long according to the cooperatives, requires every participating farm to hand-plant one strip per hour, with tractor drivers rotating in shifts at county fairgrounds. Grain elevators in Dodge City and Salina have been converted into rest stations, and the state highway patrol has closed Route 50 to traffic so that tractors can cross it without stopping.
Officials at the state agriculture department confirmed that the cooperatives submitted a permit request for the planting, which they described as the most literal reading of the instruction to make the land speak for itself. The department has asked that the furrow be kept straight for the duration of the count.