Where agricultural technology doesn't work - rice terraces

This is a very handsome image of human transformed land. TPP's initial impression was that this was a marvelously fluid work of stained glass art. This image shows rice terraces in Yunnan China that literally show the topography of a valley most people would think is too steep for agriculture. This tells you how valuable land is in some places that people would go to so much trouble for agricultural use. Clearly any modern agricultural equipment bigger than a rototiller is simply useless. It's also interesting to see how the paddies are at different stages of production mostly in the planting stage. Imagine how much maintenance is needed to keep these paddies intact. Could the human impact on the land get any more intense? Well, yes. Here in the maize and soybean desert of the upper midwest.  HT to Stoat whose blog called this to my attention. The original has a higher resolution and is posted on the Wikimedia Creative Commons and is attributed to Jialiang Gao, www.peace-on-earth.org.