To the north of the historic houses sprawls industrial farmland, west to east, on both sides of the Vacca Vale River. Corn and soybean crops, freaky and inconceivable in scale. In the summer, they become an assault of chemical green, expanding like cultish odes to geometry for acres and acres. A patina of health desperately concealing and sealing a future of dust. Of drought. Of lifeless dirt that no machine, chemical, company, or person can defibrillate. This future is already materializing, and so now, when the land can sprout nothing else, it sprouts suburbia. Developers pounced on the
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