Where Do They Put It All?

Riding that bus through the countryside last week, through Beyləqan, İmişli, Biləsuvar, and Ağcabədi, meant that I had a lot of farmland to cover.  One thing I noticed is that it is quite different from type of farming going on nearer larger cities, like Lənkəran.  Outside Lənkəran, there are a lot of villages that mostly consist of houses with large yards for some small gardening operations.  Each family will have a garden and a chicken coop.  There might be some other animals, like goats and sheep.  Yet, the bulk of the farming land is outside the residential part of the village.  The farmers live in these houses and essentially commute to their farmland.  Even just explaining that my own father in America lives on a plot that is about four or five acres and farms a big chunk of it wows most of the Azerbaijanis here.  That at one point we were on 40 acres really blows them away.  The size of the plot most of these village farmers are heading out to is no bigger than one to two acres.

What was different, however, in the countryside, was that it looked a lot more like southern Illinois.  The land is generally very flat, consisting mostly of what looks like oak savannahs, and the homes of the farmers are located on their large plots of land.  Here, though, I was mystified by what they use for storage.  There was nothing that looked like a barn, or a silo, or any sort of storage building.  What do they do with all of their harvest?

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