Wheat Harvest

The harvest in the heartland is the final act in an exciting and unpredictable play. It’s the culmination of months of planning, hard work, sweat and a few prayers.  And for wheat farmers in Washington State it can be the most important weeks of the year.  

Covering more than 10-thousand square miles across two states, this region of eastern Washington State is simply called, “the Palouse.” Blessed with abundant sunshine and rich soil, the region ranks with wheat-producing giants like Kansas, the Dakotas, and Oklahoma.

The Palouse Indians of eastern Washington and northwestern Idaho once roamed this sea of rolling hills. Today, it produces better than 160-million bushels of soft white wheat per year. Irrigation is rare.  Reliable rainfall helps farmers here create one of the highest wheat yields per acre in the world. 

By mid-summer, the harvest begins in earnest. On a good day, a farmer, working alone, can cut 80 acres. It’s much easier and more efficient than years past when teams of horses provided the muscle—the horsepower—during harvest.

Steve Appel is a third-generation wheat farmer in an especially hilly spot called “Dusty”. Steve’s personal combine lacks a leveling device that prevents dangerous rollovers. Adding a leveler would set Steve back tens of thousands of dollars.  Steve says, “Wheat farming in eastern Washington is very different than wheat farming in say Kansas or Nebraska.  Here it is very hilly and can be quite steep, and for the farmer that presents both a challenge and a greater expense.”  Steve faces other challenges as he drives his combine through miles of golden wheat, “As far as dry land wheat farming goes our biggest cost after land and equipment are fertilizer and fuel. Fertilizers of course are made from natural gas and so you imagine when your natural gas bill goes up for your home and it doubles in price, it’s going to do the same thing to our fertilizer prices and the same of course with our fuel.”

A hard-working combine can burn more than five hundred dollars in gas, per day. But the end result is worth the expense.  The combine works to harvest the wheat and separate the grain from the chaff and stems. The internal workings of the combine will rub the head of the wheat stalk, and then blow away all but the finished grain. It’s these kernels of wheat that are then milled into flour.
 
Wheat has played a powerful role in human history.  The first widely-planted grain, it turned hunter/gatherers into farmers — people who abandoned nomadic ways to form communities, cities, and great civilizations. The first Washington wheat farmers were largely German/Russian immigrants who settled here in the 1880s.

Those bygone days are captured at the train depot museum in Ritzville, Washington. Ann Olson comes from a long line of wheat farmers. She says it was a hard life for those early farmers, “I’m not even sure I can imagine what it was like. It had to be so difficult. The women went out into the fields in a cook shack to cook three meals day, hearty meals because they not only had to feed the workers, they had to feed horses. It would take sixteen to thirty-two horses to run a combine and a thrasher and the equipment out in the field.”

Crews today still work up powerful appetites and the noon-day “dinner” is a multi-course spread served in the farmhouse instead of the fields.

Only about 10 percent of the Palouse’s soft white winter wheat will end up on the Heartland’s dinner tables. Most of it’s exported.  It goes by rail, truck or barge down the Columbia River to Portland, Oregon, from there overseas to become flatbread, crackers, pastries.  Randy Suess is a wheat farmer who tracks sales overseas. He says, “We just got back from Central America and they use a lot of it for cookies and crackers. That was kind of interesting because they hadn’t traditionally been buying our soft white wheat. They’ve been buying soft red winter. After we got home we decided we’d send them a 20,000 ton sample. They just milled it and they ran it and they like it and they’ve actually made their first purchase, so we had a real good success story.”

And Randy adds, “This part of the Heartland was made to grow American wheat. When God created the heavens and the earth he got done and he looked down at the Palouse and he said, ‘this will be wheat country and nothing else.”

Some Words About Wheat:
The earliest cultivation of wheat can be traced back to the Middle East about 9 thousand years ago. Columbus brought wheat across the Atlantic on his second voyage to the new world. And while colonial Americans grew wheat, it wasn’t until the late 19th century that wheat cultivation flourished in this country. That’s when Russian immigrants to Kansas introduced a new strain of hardy wheat called, "Turkey Red".