(Continued from Part 2.)
Wheat Farming in the Heartland: A year in the life of a wheat farm
We are a diversified family farm actually growing multiple crops to provide diversified income streams. We own all of our acres and have no debt. This will be covered extensively in the part which covers the “Economics of Farming.” Everything is grown that is sold is for profit. If a crop is no longer profitable or has a strong possibility of becoming unprofitable, it is not grown or sometimes grown in a limited amount. Just because we can grow something in quantity, does not mean that we should.
In pre-industrial America, a wheat farmer had to do these tasks by hand: cutting, bundling the sheaves, drying, threshing, winnowing, and storing. When wheat is at the stage which can be expressed as “amber waves of grain,” it describes the color transformation stage from green to amber in the ripening process on the road to harvest. This first stage of the harvest required great physical stamina in swinging a scythe where two acres a day would be a routine amount using a scythe with a cradle. This was an improvement over using a sickle where usually well under an acre could be cut, but this was a forward movement in efficiency.
The imagery of “bringing in the sheaves” as expressed through the 19th Century song evokes the idea of the Great Harvest instead of wheat it is of believers who are gathered together with whom they have shared the Gospel. Threshing is actually the most labor-intensive because you are separating the wheat berries from the stalk often using a flail although other methods are often used. Other Biblical imagery included the concept of winnowing of separating the wheat from the chaff, so only the edible part of the grain is stored. In 1831, Cyrus McCormick demonstrated the first reaper which ushered in the transition and shifting the burden from man to machine with some animal assistance. Cutting was a gigantic step forward and the next binding the bundles took about until 1874 with John Appleby whose invention mechanized this step which is much more complicated.
Within a half a century of the introduction of the mechanical reaper, steam was replacing animal power on large farms. Now, a modern combine can harvest multiples of that per day with one operator versus a whole team of people. A combine can do all of these steps (the storage step is actually limited as you need to transfer it into another transfer truck to eventually a bin or truck it when the combine’s grain tank is full) at a rate of 30 acres per hour (this could easily be upwards of 100,000 pounds of wheat an hour) with the specs on one of the popular models. The record is over 200,000 pounds per hour for an eight hour test on another model. Of course, tests performed under ideal conditions or even averages can be far from actual results in the field. Comparing the speed of one horse to a modern sports car is nowhere near the ability of a combine compared to a single man harvesting.
Combines became computerized by the 1990s able to document yields and locations with the ability to analyze field data and now they have extensive self-driving capabilities using GPS. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) defines five levels of automation for driving (six if you count a level 0 which has no automation). Imagine in the future of a fully autonomous tractor where the farmer can instruct the tractor on what to do using his phone and he can do something else. The current level of autonomy being tested in one model of an “autonomous” tractor is at a level that it has to be dropped off in the field by the operator. This is great progress because if fully implemented it could remove many hours of labor and someday it may be able to do the next scenario.
Maybe at some point in the future, a farmer could give some instructions to a tractor which can leave a garage or barn, perform some type of useful task, and return itself to its parking place delivering a report as to what it accomplished perhaps with a highlight reel of any interesting events plus allowing instructions to be changed whenever by electronic instruction. The next step after that is that the tractor takes information and “decides” that the window is actually correct to do a particular farming task (examining historic weather patterns including monitoring soil temperature for ideal germination rates, considering road traffic and conditions necessary to get to a field reported by other vehicles or sensors) and completes it delivering a report after it is done.
As in most tasks, there will be some human involvement as there is in automated restaurant concepts where someone puts the ingredients into various bins that are needed for the assembly process. For a restaurant that could currently need ten people to produce a product, one or fewer could be needed in the future as this person could be divided between restaurants until even that is further reduced perhaps with robots able to perform increasingly more agile tasks with the same levels of human dexterity as has been demonstrated with robot locomotion in the past decade. In any case, fewer people will be needed for most jobs, not more.
All of this automation costs massive amounts of money. Few businessmen would look at the numbers a modern farm produces and say to themselves that sounds like a great place to park their money for a gigantic return. The amount of product a farm can produce is astronomical, but the small amount of money a farmer receives for all of this risk is just absurd. I am going to take you into some numbers so you can peak under the hood of how farming economics works on a modern grain farm, but first let’s look at the lifecycle on a wheat farm.
If you are like most people, you eat some sort of wheat often multiple times per day. At almost every meal, you are probably eating something made with wheat. You might start your day with a wheat based cereal or if you decide to have an egg and toast. After that breakfast, maybe you had a burger (bun) or fried chicken (breading) for lunch. Many dinners such as spaghetti and meatballs or macaroni and cheese contain wheat. Usually, bread is made of wheat even “white bread.”
I have traveled a lot and I have heard people think that “white flour” is somehow different than wheat. We do not have any “white flour” plants: White flour is an end product of milling and refining wheat flour. White flour is simply wheat flour with the bran, middlings, wheat germ, and wheat germ oil removed with five vitamins added back in currently for “nutrition.”
Starting in the late 1800s, roller mills in distant cities would produce flour separating components that could lead to spoilage as wheat flour once ground quickly oxidizes. This process was very different than the community-based stone ground mills which in communities near falling water were water-powered instead of animal-powered. An individual was likely to go from milling to usage that day or very quickly versus something produced in a distant factory could have been milled months ago.
By the 1930s, scientists began to see the effects of a lack of vitamins in factory-produced white flour as through the processing the bran, middlings, wheat germ, and wheat germ oil are removed and four vitamins were added back then with folic acid also being added by the 1990s. Many individuals have been rediscovering the benefits of whole grains and are now milling or grinding their own whole grains.
Wheat takes a lot out of the soil depleting it of nutrients such as nitrogen and micronutrients such as copper. Soil depletion is real and this must by addressed by farmers as it is important to monitor individual soil chemistry and deficits. A very important consideration is topsoil loss which unfortunately has been in continual deficit globally although many farmers have begun the long process to mitigate the effects through no-till farming and adding organic matter back into the soil in an effort to restore topsoil.
Continually monitoring and addressing the soil health is important because mineral imbalances often lead to lower yields or increased susceptibility to disease similar to a person who is lacking critical vitamins such as long-distance sailors suffering with scurvy in the Voyages of Discovery before Vitamin C was recognized as a critical component of a well-balanced diet.
The increase in yields is largely the result of scientific understanding of what plants need to grow and how to maximize the life cycle of annual crops to achieve increased yields. Starting with the Haber process which “unlocked” nitrogen into a form that can be readily used by plants, farm yields began a gradual march upward.
Nitrogen is 78 percent of the air you breathe, but being able to effectively use this in farming required factories to produce ammonia which 80 percent of ammonia is used for fertilizer. The story of soil fertility including the concept of how lime is critical as a soil amendment allowing better mineral uptake in plants demonstrates how one imbalance can lead to reduction in both yields and quality of crops. Earlier processes in farming to use various amendments such as animal manure were not as effective in increasing yields, so they have been supplanted over time by most farmers producing at commercial levels.
There has been a great deal of research on the concept of micro-nutrients and other components of soil health besides raw easily definable numbers. It is important for farmers to keep up with the latest developments to increase soil health as the soil is the “home” to the crops providing it with stability and the nutrients it requires. The increases in yields have been fantastic over this period and has dramatically reduced the possibility of starvation for many more people beginning in the mid-20th Century. If you look at wheat yields in our area, we have easily doubled and sometimes tripled our averages over the past 80 years. This has allowed food prices to decrease as a percentage of income and for people to have more choices.
Timing is very critical in getting a crop in because in our area ideally you want to get the wheat planted and in before first snowfall. I describe our winter as moderate compared to many regions, but a nice snowfall helps provide the wheat a nice “blanket” for the winter weather. Like everything, too much and too late often leads to later problems. There are actually 23 segments across 11 stages in the process of going from the seedling growth to tillering to stem extension to heading to flowering to ripening in cereal crops such as wheat.
The timing of the planting of winter wheat is often controlled by the harvest of usually beans. Timing matters in life and especially in farming. Winter wheat is usually planted in our area around the third week of October and the average harvest is usually in mid to late June although there have been early harvests. That is when you will see your first check usually. The average person reading this probably has a regular paycheck or if they own a business are probably paid when the job is completed or within 30 days usually. Imagine performing work for someone in October and them not paying you until June of the following year.
There is a saying that all of us stand on the shoulders of giants and nothing can be more true than in farming. We have the benefit of over a hundred years of scientific reporting and descriptions to understand prior harvests. Wheat has actually been grown in Kansas since 1839. Kansas is known as the “Wheat State” due to the amount of wheat that has been historically grown. We are fortunate that the mild climate in our area often allows us to be able to harvest a double crop of beans after wheat. It is useful to consider a few specific decades of farming, so we can understand different cycles.
If you talk to a farmer who has been around for many decades, you will often hear them talk about particular years and often you can see patterns repeat themselves as climate-like history often rhymes if not repeats in cyclical patterns. In the historical record, you can often find brief reports of major events in the crop year including overall yields and total production.
In parts 2 and 3 of my previous article, there was a discussion about the farm family in the 19th Century who unfortunately lost a parcel that we later bought in the 21st Century. Studying price is often a way to understand economic conditions at the time. The 1880s were a difficult time to be in agriculture and prices declined from $1.05 a bushel for wheat in 1881 to just 45 cents by 1884. Wheat did not even break the dollar barrier again in Kansas until 1916! A student of history would recognize 1916 as the third year of the First World War where wheat production in Europe was limited by the war and United States production was needed. By 1917, the price was $2.12 a bushel and stayed above two dollars until 1920, not reaching the two-dollars-a-bushel price again until 1947.
When prices are high, people tend to rush into investments further increasing price. Then, these booms lead to eventual busts as conditions improve and other sources are brought back into production or new sources are found which causes supply to increase and prices to decline. Crop production in Europe rebounded. During the boom years, farmers took on debt and now had to repay their creditors with crops which brought considerably less when sold. Many farmers who took on debt were unable to pay it back and these farms were lost.
One important discussion in crop history is often to look at both the weather that impacts the crop and also specific diseases or infestations that occur. I will cover one such infestation which has historically wrecked wheat crops. The Hessian fly was actually one of the reasons for the panic of 1837 where crop shortages, speculation, and easy credit caused a cascading series of bank failures and unemployment. If you think the name sounds familiar, the story is that the fly was supposedly carried in the bedding of Hessian soldiers during the American Revolutionary War period. The Hessian Fly devastated many wheat crops through the 1930s and the principles of scientific farming have helped to reduce the devastating effects of this persistent pest. The varieties of wheat are now better able to resist most disease and these improved varieties of wheat are yielding more than ever before with increased resistance to disease. Using integrated pest management strategies, the Hessian Fly is well controlled in many areas through observation of the life cycle, using crop rotation, and better varieties of wheat.
The 1920s and 1930s were a very difficult time in farming because of the high debt load many farmers acquired during the boom war years. Wheat prices averaged about $1.16 a bushel during the 1920s, but many farmers expanded purchasing land at higher prices when wheat was over 2 dollars a bushel. By the end of the decade, the Great Depression began and by 1930 the price for a bushel had declined to 63 cents. The years of 1931 and 1932 were especially tragic with wheat being 33 cents a bushel both years. In those years, it often cost more for producing a crop than you would have achieved in selling it.
The Great Depression affected almost everyone with unemployment surging to about 25 percent of men were unemployed during the height of economic turmoil. Especially difficult was the year 1932 in which the summer of ’32 is now known as the economic bottom of the Great Depression, but few people realized it was the bottom at the time. This was a national event of monumental scope: In Mississippi in April of 1932, 25 percent of the land in the state was sold at foreclosure auctions across the state!
Preceding this was the collapse in the price of cotton: During the boom war years cotton was worth over 30 cents a pound, but in the depths of the Depression it was worth about a nickel a pound. Commodity after commodity could be easily be profiled along with all of the stories about how farm families were forced off their land due to inability to pay back debt, families who were in cities who were unable to pay their rent or mortgages were forced out onto the street.
Booms in agriculture are often event-based many times relatively short term and busts often last for years with often tragic consequences. Events such as the First World War or the recent war in the breadbasket of Europe often send prices higher and in the example of the First World War, these prices stayed higher for a longer time. Sometimes short-term weather events impacting the amount of crop is harvested will lead to higher prices. A poor wheat crop in certain areas when yours was unaffected is a situation that has happened to us when our area had sufficient rain at the right times, but other areas were in drought leading to higher prices.
(To be continued tomorrow, in Part 4.)
A Concluding Note From JWR: This young man is prayerfully seeking a wife. He is offering a gift of $18,000 to whoever introduces him to his bride, after marriage. For some details, see his recent article: A Quest and a Gift.