Crop Circles and Walking Haystacks

While visiting Moray and Salineras in the beautiful countryside to the Northwest of Cusco, we saw both walking haystacks and crop circles. Which sounds more farfetched? OK, we didn’t really see walking haystacks, we saw walking bundles of grass. Still not buying? I can’t say I blame you. What if I were to say the bundles of grass walked on four hoofed legs and, as our taxi came up behind four of these mobile mounds of mower mulch, we were treated to a view of burro butt right in the middle of each of these walking haystacks. Now we’re getting somewhere. It’s currently toward the end of the rainy season and most of the crops here are approaching maturity and will be harvested soon, before the dry season turns most of these fields brown for the next half of a year. This means that the countryside is carpeted with small plots of variously colored grains undulating in the breeze like one of Grandma Bea’s patchwork quilts covering a couple of newlyweds. In the background we were treated to views of the stark black rock of the Cordillera Villcabamba and Urubumba mountains which were softened by mantles of puffy white clouds that would occasionally part to reveal glimpses of massive glaciers and stark hanging valleys. The agricultural plots are small because the farming in this area is done by hand, largely without the use of mechanized devices. This necessitates both planting crops in small fields that can be reasonably harvested by human and animal in a reasonable period of time and planting a diversity of crops so that they do not all come to maturity at the same time. Now, I’ve nothing against those Midwestern vistas of corn tassels tasseling as far as the eye can see and a horizon full of colorful sunflowers craning their necks toward the sun as it passes over like so many yellow-collared, brown-faced tennis spectators watching a match in extreme slow-motion. Such sights can, and do, inspire awe. And, if truth be told, I do think that a field of blue tipped flax waving in the wind looks much like the waves of a sea and, unlike some contemporary band making a buck covering Motown classics, the flax suffers little in comparison to the real thing. But these scenes are only made possible by the huge economies of scale required of the highly capitalized mechanized farming of the great plains of the Midwest United States. And while one might marvel at a massive two-story tractor that costs more than the average house in the U.S., such machinery is not intrinsically beautiful in itself. When these economies of scale are applied to the production of animals, the resulting barrack rows of five chickens to a small cage and the unappealing un-naturalness of high-density feed lots inspire in me less a sense of awe than of revulsion; which brings us back to the grain-framed burro butts. Almost all of the farming work here is done by humans and animals. We saw oxen hitched to plows and dozens of children and women shepherding flocks of sheep, pigs, and cattle. I’m not saying that these farmers have it better than those in the U.S., they almost certainly don’t in terms of required manual labor and the monetary fruits of that labor but I am saying that such scenes of pastoral splendor are certainly much more aesthetically pleasing to the visitor and, I would have to assume, to the residents themselves. That said, I bet there wasn’t a one of these farmers who wouldn’t trade their farm for the one my mother grew up on in South Dakota faster than you could say walking haystacks. Pastoral splendor doesn’t pay for your kids’ dental work or soothe a back that’s aches from plowing a field by hand. The productivity of U.S. style capital-intensive agriculture leads to incredible productivity and I would warrant that my mother’s childhood farm produces more grain than half of the state of Cusco, but this is, without doubt, a beautiful and fascinating place.

The farms to which I refer are located in the Andean highlands between roughly 10,000 and 12,000 feet of elevation. Not what we typically think of as prime farming land in the U.S. How did farming, and thus civilization, in particular the Inca civilization, adapt crops like corn to these high-altitude conditions? The answer lies in the afore-mentioned crop circles. These are not the result of oil dripping from a leaky oilpan gasket on Han Solo´s Millenian Falcon; these are the simultaneously ancient and innovative crop-laboratories of Moray. The Incas, or possibly an earlier civilization, discovered a fascinating phenomenon that occurs in four natural depressions on the plains Northwest of Cusco. Apparently, because of their location relative to both the larger Andes and to the hills and plains immediately surrounding the depressions, distinct microclimates can be found and different depths of the bowls. In order to take advantage of this discovery, the Incas carved various layers of concentric circles into these depressions and terraced them with the incredible stone masonry work which they utilized at other sites. The result is a series of what are essentially natural greenhouses that the Incas could use to develop strains of crops that could survive in the cultivable terrain available. While I typically don’t get much more excited about crop laboratories than I do about farm machinery, the very age and essence of these bowls are awe inspiring and not just because of their historical significance but because of the intrinsic aesthetic beauty of the melding of form and function.

As we climbed down from the top to the bottom of the biggest depression, we could notice a distinct elevation in temperature. According to one scientist, the difference in temperature from the top layer to the bottom is often a full 15 degrees celsius which is the difference in the average mean temperature between London and Bombay. As one descends, the temperature increase makes one feel as though they are descending into a terrarium, an experience that is heightened by the progression from smaller to smaller circles. I found myself looking up hoping that the makers of more fanciful crop circles weren´t in the process of screwing on the lid and, if they were, that they remembered to punch holes in the top this time. As you can guess by the publication of this missive, there was no lid and we are still out exploring all that this region has to offer.