We're currently planning for a trip to the US later this year.  We'll be doing a long road trip, including a visit to Colorado, somewhere we've never been to other than a couple of hours in Denver airport years ago.  Looking for interesting things to do on a trip is a lot less hit and miss than it used to be and Google Earth helps a lot.  On that last brief visit to the state, our connecting flight took us over some unusual (for Britain) agricultural areas which were clearly visible from the air.  Google Earth allows me to share it with you.

Here's part of Colorado from about 750km above the earth's surface and we're looking at the green area near the centre of the image that just about touches the state boundary (dashed line).  It's not a part of the state that we'll be visiting, but in my noodling around on the maps, I saw it and did some research.




Zoom in a bit to 150km and we see regular green geometric shapes. Well....circles, and lots of them!  This is a high desert plain - 7,500 feet above sea level and dense, lush greenery should be scarce.




Fly down to about 10km and you start to see a bit more detail.
Each one of those circles is 0.8 of a kilometer in diameter.  That's half a mile.
So each field is 50.3 hectares, or 124.3 acres.




Down at about 3.5km, you can see a lot more.
Each individual field is a whole farm.  There's a house and barn in one corner.
In the UK, the average farm size is about 50 hectares too, but our average field size is about 12 hectares.




At 2km, we can see an irrigation system which rotates around the field from a pivot point in the centre.  There's a bore hole in the centre which taps into an aquifer.  The system does one full rotation every three days.  Into the pipe goes water, pesticides and fertilisers as required.
This is where the Coors brewery gets most of its barley from But other crops are potatoes, lettuce and alfalfa.