Opinion

Wheat stubble

Friday, July 26, 2013

What's happening in all that wheat stubble? This year the weather has made many changes in what farmers tried to plant -- or replant. One time the fields were too wet to plant anything. Then when they were able to plant, it rained and rained and in some fields the little plants got drowned. When it dried up a bit, the seeds that hadn't yet come up when the rains came, couldn't break through the now crusted soil. What a mess! But not to worry, the wheat did great.

When I was growing up in this area, wheat was the main crop on our farm. Since we were gone during the school year, wheat, with a little attention from our neighbor, Jim Berry, could get along fine. My brothers would be home in the late spring in time to work in the harvest, cutting the wheat, binding and putting the bundles in little shocks. Then when it was our time to have the threshing machine come, the whole family would be involved in either working in the fields, or in the kitchen preparing to feed a room full of threshers. My brothers would usually have the job of taking the threshed grain to Ellis where there was a box car waiting on the railroad siding to take our grain to market. I loved to escape the kitchen and sit in the warm shelled grain in the wagon, or later the truck, as it was taken over to Ellis. I even managed to chew a few of the grains along the way. In later years the grain was stored in our own granary on the farm, and it became a wonderful playground where we could jump from the ladders down into the grain and make it our private gymnasium.

This season our wheat was harvested in one operation from standing wheat stalks to truckloads of grain in one day. No one had to feed a bunch of dirty, tired men who came to thresh the grains from the gathered wheat shocks. The grain was trucked to market or storage away from our farm, and we awaited the check without ever even touching or tasting a grain of wheat. Of course, today it would not be safe to chew on a grain because it would get stuck in my teeth.

What was left of that golden crop were acres of wheat stubble. I awaited the next step, of preparing the ground for a crop of late soy beans. But I never saw the fields being plowed or disked in preparation. It wasn't too wet or too dry, but the wheat stubble just stayed there. Our neighbors' fields looked the same way, just wheat stubble.

I was concerned about what was happening, but didn't want to show my ignorance of modern methods, so I just watched out the windows. Finally, I began seeing some green in rows appearing in the wheat stubble. Obviously I wasn't watching on the day that soybeans were planted right in the field. The stubble was not plowed under, the soil was not disturbed again, but now you can see rows of small green soy bean plants appearing in the wheat fields. As they grow they can be compared to the older soybean plants in neighboring fields that were planted early in the spring as soon as conditions allowed it. There will be two times of harvesting the beans this year. The older plants will be ready before these new ones which are coming through the wheat stubble will have matured.

But now I realize that next year there will be very little wheat growing. By the time that this late crop is harvested, it may be too late to plant any winter wheat. If that happens, I will miss seeing my favorite crop, but it will be nice to get the checks from the soybeans that were nurtured by the old wheat stubble.