The Amazing Shrinking Wheat Plant

"I thought wheat was taller than this..." was a comment made to me during our wheat harvest this year.  I've actually heard this comment several times since I've been on the farm and thinking back I had the same notion when I came out here for the first time.  I think this idea is in our collective minds because of black and white photos we've seen from the 1920s and 1930s.  In my mind it's a picture of a disembodied head of a grinning farmer, his body well ensconced in a tall stand of wheat.  So what happened?

Dr. Norman Borlaug was a scientist who revolutionized the way the world produces wheat. In Mexico in the 1960's he developed a system of high volume crossbreeding, then doubled the amount of crosses he was able to produce each year by "shuttle breeding."  He would take the harvest from one location and move it to another location with a different climate and immediately plant it for the following crop season.  The amount of new wheat varieties he produced allowed him to shift the architecture of the wheat plant towards higher and higher production capability.

The successful wheat varieties that he created through his system were all shorter in height, were resistant to a fungus that attacks wheat called rust and responded to a high degree to fertilizers.  After his varieties were released to farmers in Mexico, within a few years Mexico had went from foreign aid depended to feed their citizens to completely self-sufficient.  After the success of his wheat production system in Mexico, Dr. Borlaug was asked to help with similar issues in Pakistan and several Asian countries.  So our notions of tall wheat are all outdated because scientists and farmers have focused on higher and higher yielding varieties.  Which in turn made our wheat varieties shorter and shorter.

One morning in 1970 Dr. Borlaug was working in Mexico in a remote field on his wheat crosses.  His wife received several phone calls for her husband but since he was out at work for the day she told them they'd have to call back later.  Until she was told by one caller that her husband was going to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  After hearing the news, his wife drove to a research center and rode in a farm pickup to a remote field. There Dr. Borlaug was told about the winning the Nobel Prize.  So, Dr. Borlaug was told that he was outstanding in his field while he was literally out standing in his field...

Wheat harvest for our farm this year was kind of a disappointment.  In the month of May alone we had a blizzard, hail and a late freeze.  All of which seriously hurt the yield average across our farm.  On a positive note I think I got some good harvest pics out of the deal.

-Wheat Farmer Ryan

My Grain Headaches Suggested Reading:

• The Man Who Feed the World  by Leon Hesser was a very interesting read about Norman Borlaug's life and his life's work on solving how to feed the population of the world. 

• Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity Is an article originally published in The Atlantic. 

Bulls on Parade

Every fall we separate our bulls from the cows and reunite them in the spring.  This allows us to control the timing of when we start the calving season.  The bulls spend some time in their bachelor pad mainly beefing up (pun intended) and fighting with each other all day.

We use a gestation table to determine the first day we'd like to see calves arrive and then put the bulls with the cows accordingly.  Since it was a soppy May we had to pull our bulls to a remote pasture with the mechanical front wheel drive (MFWD) engaged on our tractor to help us get through the muddy roads.

-Rancher Ryan

Blizzards and Hail and Floods - Oh May

Dear May,

I'm glad to see you go.  You arrived with a blizzard and then you proceed to rain and hail on us the whole time you were here.  Look I get it, you heard that we wanted some moisture.  This is not what we meant May.  We wanted some moisture after we planted our corn.  That way we'd actually have a corn crop to harvest.  It's hard to get a corn crop though, if you can't plant because it's too wet.  You wanted to be famous for rainfall totals, well... you are forth since we started to record rainfall.  I hope you are happy with yourself.

May.  It feels like Eastern Kansas here.  Humidity, flies, and mosquitoes.  Did you know that mosquitoes love me May?  They do.  I read they like people with O type blood, they like guys more than gals and they like fat people.  I'm the trifecta of mosquito mayhem May.  Why did you do this to me?


Sincerely,

Farmer Ryan

P.S. -  Tell your friend June to leave us alone...