When there’s not much to look at but endless corn and soybeans, you start to focus on most anything that stands out. That’s how I came to notice a difference in barn styles between Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. Illinois had two distinctive types of barns: ones with a peaked central roof and two lower wings:

and tall, narrower barns with steep roofs. I especially loved the little cupolas on top. Most were clearly older structures. 

Cross into Indiana, and the barns became very utilitarian: plain, rectangular, pre-fab looking. I’m guessing their main purpose is to shelter equipment, rather than livestock and feed. Most of these farms had clusters of large silos. Very agri-business.

Then in Ohio, there were lots of red (and sometimes white) barns with the name and date of the farm on them. Very tidy family farms. Possibly Mennonite (certainly many of the names sounded very familiar to my PA German ears).

October is harvest time: those endless fields of corn were disappearing into the maws of harvesters and big trailer trucks right and left. 

The other thing that jumped out at me were the numbers of wind farms that I passed. This one stretched as far as I could see, all across the horizon. I must have passed three or four good sized wind farms in the space of a day. And I know that those blades are much higher above the ground than they look, but it would take a braver soul than I to drive a tractor around under those things!