Happy cows ahead!

Well perhaps not happy, because most of the dairy cows here are kept in big smelly corrals, rather than in the green fields I remember from my childhood. But they'll be well fed.

This modern-day cowboy (look closely for the hat) is cutting Alfalfa in a field just down from the house. They'll let it dry for a day or two then come back with a bunch of other machines to bale it, and cart it away. Chandler was almost all farm-land when we moved to AZ 15 years ago - now it's almost all houses, with a few, as yet undeveloped fields like this one, scattered among the houses. This farmer will get a half dozen Alfalfa crops from this field this year, and will likely keep doing that until he can make the big bucks, selling the land to a developer.

It'll be tougher to be an Arizona dairy cow then, I guess.