History Lesson 
The Sons of the Pioneers
It’s a big job, feeding America, but someone’s got to do it.
(Page 2 of 7)
“This row of turning spikes is my rotary hoe. It breaks up the ground and uproots those damn weeds. This heavy number is my land leveler. You run it over the field before making your furrows. This”—he dismissed a rusting hulk with a wave of his hand—“is a ditcher, but we don’t use it anymore. I use aluminum pipe instead. My sweep plow here saved our land the past few years. It cuts weeds, and instead of plowing them under like the old deep plow used to do, it leaves them on top of the ground. Keeps the topsoil from blowing away and conserves moisture.” Facing the row of equipment was a pile of rusted fence posts and wire and the barn, which housed the single most expensive Wagner implement, the John Deere 6600 combine.
In the few remaining weeks before Don harvested his father’s legacy, he continued to work on the implements, particularly the combine and the two motors that powered his irrigation pumps. The combine reduced harvest time phenomenally, but without the loud irrigation motors there would be little to harvest. Mart had drilled two wells in the sixties, the first 510 feet down, and the second about 480. It took both wells to irrigate the 640 acres. For a while, the first had pumped nearly 1200 gallons per minute, but now it was down to about 700. The second well was also down, from 1000 gallons per minute to 600.
The Ogallala Aquifer, the vast reservoir that lies beneath the Great Plains from South Dakota to Texas, has been declining—by two feet a year in some parts of the county. Each year the farmers have to go deeper to get water. The Ogallala formation is the accumulation of thousands of years of precipitation. Rainfall, dripping through the porous sand and gravel subsurface, has been trapped by impervious clay—the Permian red beds—to form a huge underground lake. But because of extensive irrigation this lake is running dry.
Irrigated farming, now a way of life in the Panhandle, has only been practiced in Ochiltree County for twenty or so years. No one knows how much longer the aquifer will sustain it. During the drought of the early fifties, Howard Holt and his son Robert drilled the first well up on the “flats,” the northern half of the county. They found water at three hundred feet. By the end of the parched year of 1955, there were 38 wells in the county pumping water to dying crops. From 1948 to 1970 irrigated acres in the Panhandle increased from a little over a million to more than five and a half million. By 1970, more than $5 billion was invested in Panhandle irrigation that watered more than two million acres each of cotton and grain sorghum and one million acres of wheat. In Ochiltree County there were more than 600 wells in 1977; each bushel of wheat required 16,250 gallons of water, or about 38 trillion gallons for the crop each year.
Don Wagner’s first harvest went well in 1977. In mid-June he cut 11,000 bushels of his father’s irrigated wheat crop—59 bushels an acre, 18 more than the county average. The continuing drought killed most of the dryland wheat. From eighty acres he harvested only 80 bushels. Like his father, Don worked alone and didn’t use “custom cutters,” the families who follow the wheat harvest from the Texas Cross Timbers to Canada, hiring out their trucks and combines. Without his combine, Don would have had to hire the “wheaties,” as the custom cutters are sometimes called, paying them $7.50 an acre as a cutting charge plus 10 cents a bushel as a hauling fee.
Before the tall gold wheat was reduced to tawny stubble, he had planted another two hundred acres or so with grain sorghum, which is also known as milo or maize. Grain sorghum had been the favorite crop of the famous XIT Ranch in the 1880s because of its resistance to drought and its nutritional value as cattle feed. Until the development in the 1950s of a variety with short stalks and erect heads, milo had remained only a small part of the Texas farmers’ harvest because it had to be harvested by hand. The rust-colored head hung down (crooked-neck milo it was called), and a harvester cut off the hanging head by hand and tossed it against the following wagon’s “bumpboard,” which performed the function of a basketball backboard. The new erect varieties could be harvested by combines.
Watching the water move down his own rows of milo, Don explained the popularity of the crop. “Two things happened. One, feedlots became a huge industry in the Panhandle and became the biggest buyer of harvested milo for cattle feed. And second, seed development reached the point where the farmer can vary his crop almost acre by acre with selective seeding. I can pick from short-season, long-season, dry-row, or irrigated-field seeds. I can plant for a quick crop or for a crop of longer maturation. And yields have increased tremendously. A four- or five-ton yield per acre is not unusual. Also, we’re getting hybrids that have a higher protein content and are resistant to disease.”
Before it is harvested in October, milo has to be irrigated at least four times for profitable yields. “Here in Ochiltree County,” said Don, “the most successful variety of milo matures after 110 days, a mid-to-late maturing date. You have to be careful that you plant early enough in the late spring so the crop will be ready to harvest in October before the first hard freeze.” By late May 1977, Don’s mid-to-late maturing milo seeds, which resembled pink BBs, were in the ground.
In the late summer, after the milo was planted and the June wheat harvest completed, Don prepared and about 180 acres for the next planting of irrigated wheat. First he attached a disk plow, which resembles a row of vertical pie plates, to his tractor and ran it over the wheat stubble to chop the straw. He then attached a land-plane to eliminate the old furrows and level the field. By mid-July it was time to fertilize. Because the higher yields of irrigated wheat sap the soil of many nutrients, the chief element, nitrogen, must be added back. Don spreads 150 pounds per acre of anhydrous ammonia, a nitrogenous fertilizer, on his land.
In August Don dug the furrows with his lister plow, a thirty-foot row of V-shaped wedges. Furrows carried the water from one end of the field to the other, and the flatter the land, the deeper and wider the furrow had to be. In northwest Ochiltree County, where the land is extremely flat, the furrows had to eight to ten inches deep and forty inches wide. Even though the land was flat as a dime, it sloped, so that if the furrows were too shallow, the water would break sideways instead of running straight.
Don seeded his acreage the last week in August, 75 pounds of seed acre for irrigated wheat, as opposed to 30 pounds an acre he would sow for his ninety acres of dryland wheat a month later. After the seeding, the land was irrigated for the first time. When he turned on his pumps, Don was reminded how farming had changed in his absence. Everything cost more, but especially the natural gas that powered virtually all the irrigation motors in the county. Instead of costing 30 to 40 cents a thousand cubic feet, as if did fifteen years ago, it now cost $1.50. The monthly gas bill ran to $1800 rather than $500. Don shared the belief with other farmers that irrigation on the High Plains and elsewhere would be reduced in future years not only by the drying up of the Ogallala Aquifer but also by prohibitive natural gas prices.
After watering his crop 24 hours a day for three weeks to get the wheat plants started in the dry fall of 1977, and after sowing his dryland wheat seed, Don harvested his milo crop. He averaged 6000 pounds an acre, 2200 pounds above the county average. He worked hard through the rest of the fall and winter, but his most recurring activity was looking for the clouds that would bring rain. A woman who had lived in Ochiltree County since 1917, and who remembered plentiful harvest years with the same joy as she did her first love and disaster years with the same sadness of her husband’s death, said once, “I have spent my whole life looking for clouds that never came.” It would be seven more months before the clouds would come for Don Wagner. When they finally appeared in the west, they would come with a vengeance.
From the beginnings of civilization, man has asked in prayer and petition, “Give us this day our daily bread.” The cultivation of wheat changed man from a nomad to a settler, who founded villages, then cites, as he traded grain with his neighbors. Wheat gives man its bounty only in exchange for his labor. It will not spread itself. The nonbrittle spike, which attaches the seed to the plant, does not break in wind or rain as will self-disseminating grasses; therefore, the seed cannot scatter without man’s help. To grow wheat successfully, man had to settle down.
Wheat is the world’s most important grain crop, the staple food of one billion people, the principal foodstuff of 45 countries (compared to 25 for rice and 16 for corn). It will grow at the Arctic Circle or near deserts, from Canada and Finland to Australia. Every month wheat is being harvested somewhere in the world on cropland that constitutes more than one-fifth of the planet’s arable acreage. It is the largest cash crop in North America.
Columbus brought wheat to the New World when he returned to the West Indies in 1493. Cortes took wheat from Spain to Mexico in 1519, and missionaries carried it from there to what is now Arizona and California. At Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, a colonist named Bartholomew Gosnold planted wheat in 1602. Sixteen years later other colonists tried growing it at Jamestown in Virginia, but because their tobacco crops had leached out the soil, the wheat failed to take hold. For two centuries corn remained the dominant crop. In the 1800s wheat traveled with the pioneers, down the valleys of Pennsylvania, through the Cumberland Gap, across Kentucky, Ohio, into Indiana and Illinois, and, at last, to its natural home, the Great Plains, a vast semiarid landscape that stretched from the Texas Panhandle to Canda. After the Civil War, the Great American Desert, as the plains were known, began to be settled by hardy pioneer families, who lived in sod dugouts and scraped a living from the soil. From its first start on the Great Plains, wheat has been beholden to the government, most specifically to the Homestead Act and the Pacific Railroad Act, both of 1862. One gave the land; the other made it accessible.
The forests east of the 98th meridian furnished pioneers with food, fuel, building material, implements furniture, and fences. The plains provided almost nothing. There was only the soil, which could not be eaten or burned and was barely usable for building. But with the right crop, the plains would give forth all these things. Wheat could provide food, and, if it was grown in enough quantity, it could be exchanged for all the necessities the grasslands didn’t provide.
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