It’s amazing how much food goes to waste here in Austria. I must seen have a thousand acres of rotting corn and dried-up sunflowers this weekend when I rode my bike out to Krems, about 50 miles west of Vienna along the Danube. The asphalt path followed the highway, and then the river, occasionally meandering from one to the other and through the occasional field.

The sunflowers had a really sad look to them. Most of the petals were gone, and the rest shriveled and brown like autumn leaves. The huge convex discs that remained in the center had gone from brown to black, as if burnt. Across entire fields, the stalks stood straight, chin high, but the flowers were wilted over in unison. While taking a picture of one, I noticed that all of the flowers were facing away from the mid-afternoon sun, as if they had all died in that position, trying to shield their faces from scorching rays.

I saw a good dozen fields like that today. One was probably 100 acres.

In the corn fields, the stalks looked healthy, but most had two or three ears beginning to rot.

It was much the same last weekend, when I rode about 40 miles east to Bratislava, in Slovenia.

It all reminded me of my ride across southern Austria two years ago, when I saw fields and fields of crushed pumpkins outside of Graz. I had guessed that the farmers had harvested the seeds, which are ground and pressed to make delicious cooking oil, straight out of the fields. I wondered what sort of combine could do that.

Now I suspect that those pumpkins had been partially plowed under.

From what I understand, corn is in pretty high demand back in the United States, both for food and for ethanol production.

I can only guess that the rotting crops are a result of the European Union’s agricultural policies, which support farmers though an extensive web of subsidies and regulations. Did the famers know in March that this many sunflowers and ears of corn would die in the fields? I suspect it didn’t matter if they were getting paid to plant crops, and not to sell them.

I’ve seen plenty of situations like that before in California, but only once among commercial crops. That was three Septembers ago in California’s Temecula Valley, when the wine grape harvest followed Southern California’s rainiest winter and spring in maybe 10 years. It was a bumper crop, and the tanks at wineries in Temecula Valley were full of juice by the time two-thirds of the harvest was crushed.

I see the same situation almost every weekend back in the Escondido area when I’m out riding. Usually it’s oranges, but sometimes lemons, sometimes avocados, and sometimes pomegranates.  Usually they’re one- and two-acre groves, and they’re usually not too far from houses. Every tree I see has five or ten oranges on the ground below, newly fallen, split open or rotting. I’m guessing that the residents have the groves there because they like the idea, and don’t worry too much about the cost of water. Apparently the cost of picking and packaging the oranges is more than the fruit could bring at market. Whatever the case, it’s unfortunate considering the current drought across most of the U.S.

In the commercial fields I saw this weekend, I also had to wonder about the environmental effects of fertilizer that was used on the fields. There must have been plenty of it to allow the plants to grow so densely: The sunflower stalks were separated by less than a foot. In the corn stalks, that was about two feet.

No waste in the vineyards I saw this weekend around Krems. I stepped into one field to get a shot of a hilltop castle with vines in the foreground. The grapes were big -- about the size of the little rubber superballs that I’d bring home from parties when I was a kid. Most bunches had about 50 grapes, and most had gone from pale green to a deep blue. I ate four or five of the ripe grapes, with the rationale that they just might otherwise end up going to waste.