History Lesson 
The Sons of the Pioneers
It’s a big job, feeding America, but someone’s got to do it.
(Page 7 of 7)
While farm income in the century has always been 10 to 30 per cent below nonfarm income, the current agricultural crisis dates back to 1972 and graphically demonstrates how the Ochiltree County farmer is affected by occurrences around the world. Eight years ago, crippling droughts in Russia, China, Australia, and Argentina reduced the world supply of grain. That year, Russia bought almost one-fourth of all U.S. wheat, and in 1973, negotiating secretly with U.S. grain companies, the Soviets bought even more. At the same time, the Agriculture and Consumer Protection Act of 1973 ended price-support measures and lifted restrictions on the amount of land a farmer could plant. As in World War I and World War II, farmers were encouraged to plant fence to fence. American reserves had failed drastically and the federal government urged optimum yields. With export demands skyrocketing and reserves down, prices shot up from $1.57 in 1971 to $5 a bushel in 1974.
During these halcyon years, farmers made money. They bought new equipment (John Deere sales vaulted $1 billion between 1972 and 1974), remodeled or bought new homes, sent sons and daughters to college, and bought land. The farmer’s share of the food dollar in 1974 was 46 cents, compared to 38 cents today. Wheat farmers in 1974 got 25 cents of every dollar spend on grain goods; today they get 13 cents. Farm income rose from $6200 per family in 1972 to $9925 in 1974. Ochiltree County farmers enjoyed the prosperity along with their colleagues, but in the process they became equipment heavy, according to Don Townsen, First National Bank of Perryton vice president. “In 1971, you could buy a machine for $25,000 and the next year could come back in and they would give you $26,000 trade-in for a new one. The new one would cost, say, $30,000. Any money you made could be put into equipment and it would increase in value each year,” said Townsen. “Then in 1975, when demand for equipment dropped off and used equipment values dropped thirty per cent in a few months, these guys lost their equity an didn’t have any borrowing base. Plus, in 1976 most farmers lost a little money and in 1977 they lost a lot. That’s why we have big debts in this county.”
The hoedown ended in late 1974. Consumers blamed the farmer for the 10 cent rise in the cost of a loaf of bread and sounded the alarm that “dollar bread” was inevitable. President Gerald Ford announced the 1974 grain embargo, and, in the middle of a season when farmers were planting fence to fence, there were no foreign customers, just a mounting surplus. Prices fell back to $1.80 a bushel, but the cost of farming kept rising, as did the farmer’s debt, which now is almost 119 billion, a 100 per cent increase from 1970.
The government, which had urged fence-to-fence planting, now did nothing to remedy the surplus situation. Finally, last September Congress passed a farm law designed to limit production and cut the surplus. Most farmers consider it a form of welfare, but early everyone in Ochiltree County has agreed to take a total of about 50,000 acres out of production so that they will be eligible for disaster and subsidy payments or loans.
This year’s harvest for Ochiltree County farmers began the third week in June, when temperatures climbed over one hundred degrees. Earl McGarraugh and his crews started with four combines abreast on his eastern fields. The test weight per bushel was disappointing—51 pounds. Number one grade is 50 pounds per bushel, and the county average is about 57 to 58, but the fields had held water too long after the May rains. Then came the hot winds, which further damaged the kernels. South of Perryton his test weight improved to 61 pounds per bushel, more to his liking. Grain elevators paid full prices at 58. Earl suffered the usual equipment breakdowns and labor hassles as one man then another quit. He harvested 27,000 bushels, averaging only 8 an acre, a bad year for the county’s top farmer.
May 24 for Don Wagner was the day to finish planting fifty acres of milo. Forty acres were already in the ground. He lifted the fifty-pound sacks containing the BB-like pink seed and filled the drill boxes behind the John Deere. He started the tractor, found the country-and-Western station from Guymon, Oklahoma, turned on the air conditioning, and remembered how his father used to work in the sun all day in his old parasol-topped tractor with the hot wind blowing hotter as it came off the exhaust pipes that stuck up in front of the seat. The noise from the old tractors was like listening to the firing of artillery for eight hours. New tractors, like combines, lessened the work load immensely. More horsepower, round cabs that deflected the noise from the exhaust pipes, air conditioning, cushioned seat suspension, improved eight-speed transmission, radio, tape decks—all the comforts that farmers didn’t have ten years ago were now almost impossible to do without.
North of the Wagner barn, Don earlier had checked and watered the hundred small olive trees and sixty red cedars he had ordered from the Soil Conservation Service and planted in rows. “By the time Keith gets married, he’s going to have a real nice windbreak. The problem is, we need it now,” said Don. Since the cottonwoods had been destroyed, the farmstead was almost bare and the wind never quit. Back in the 1880s, the sod houses had a “crowbar hole.” According to the story, you pushed the crowbar out the hole and if it came back bent, the wind was normal. If it came back broken, you had better stay in the house.
Outside Don’s tractor cab, a gentle breeze began picking up speed as it shifted from the southeast to the west. Panhandle old-timers will tell you that when the wind shifts during a drought, you might expect rain. Farther west, a warm tropical air mass from the Gulf of Mexico was about to meet and rise over a huge heavier, colder air mass, which had traveled south from Canada. Don had noticed the cloud build up toward Spearman, but it didn’t look dangerous, and he welcomed the idea of rain. It would be another hour before the more peaceful cumulus cloud was transformed into the boiling vertical-shaped cumulonimbus with its characteristic anvil top that reached 50,000 feet above Ochiltree County. After running the chicken picker over about thirty acres, Don parked the tractor and filled the drill boxes with more milo seed for an early start in the morning. By the time he drove his small Chevrolet Luv pickup toward Perryton, 22 miles east, raindrops had begun splashing on the windshield.
By eight o’clock in the evening, the black cloud covered the whole western horizon except for a single aperture over Don Wagner’s barn, where the sun, dramatically illuminating dust and water droplets in the air, defiantly poured through before it surrendered the day. When the cloud reached the county, coming northeast from Spearman, it contained rain, dust, high winds, streaks of lightning, and deafening thunder.
But this cloud carried worse baggage. The strong updrafts thrust raindrops to the top of the cloud where they froze into ice grains. They then fell to the lower levels of the cloud, picked up another layer of rain, and ascended again. Many times this cycle was repeated until the spherical objects became too heavy to stay aloft. Only then did the hailstones, the size of hen’s eggs, fall to earth.
Don’s first cousin Tommy Butler, who farmed half a mile away, called Don around nine o’ clock. “There’s a hell of a storm just passing over. I can’t tell the extent of the damage because another one is just beginning,” said Butler. “I don’t want to hear about it,” replied Wagner. Butler called again at ten, and while they were talking they were disconnected. The line was dead. At the same time, the rain and hail hit Perryton. Joe Easley Ford suffered damage to 27 new cars, Channel 10 was knocked off the air, Earl McKinley Insurance Agency would receive over two hundred claims for damaged property, the Scramble Golf Tournament was canceled because the greens were ruined, and Perryton’s streets were flooded for 45 minutes after the three-inch deluge.
The next morning Don Wagner rode west on the Lord Switch Road to his farm. Passing the farms closer to town he felt all right. Some of his neighbors’ wheat was damaged but not completely ruined. He knew about hail. His dad’s crop was totally demolished in 1951, the last time anyone had suffered serious loss out his way. He knew the path of a hailstorm was as capricious as a tornado’s. He had considered insurance after the freeze earlier this month, but it had not damaged his crop. Insurance cost $12 to $13 an acre, and, after all, the last hail damage in the area was twenty-seven years ago. So he didn’t buy any.
He turned the corner, stopped the Luv, got out, and stared, standing as still as a post. After a minute or two, he reached down and pulled up a piece of grass and slid the narrow end through his teeth. He twanged his nose with his index finger and thumb while he stepped back as if he were holding a camera and had to refocus on the scene. His green wheat, nurtured for nine months, was smashed flat.
There would be no harvest this year, nothing at all to show for his $30,000 investment. The hailstones had beaten the young plants flat to the ground. They lay there in pools of water, already beginning to rot. Soon they would turn brown and begin to smell, giving a putrid odor to the clean-scented countryside.
The storm had also blown off a barn door, scattered and split a piece of irrigation pipe, battered to the ground most of his young olive and cedar trees, and knocked all the roses off the twenty-year-old bushes his mother had planted.
Don Wagner turned and went home. He picked up Nancy and the two kids and some inner tubes and brought them back to enjoy his new lakes. You can’t do much more when it’s too wet to plow.
In a few days, after the shock began to wane, he and his son, Keith, sloshed around the farm making plans. Don was a man who tried to believe things turned out for the good. Despite temptation, sin, and the fall from grace, salvation was yours if you kept the faith. As the water receded, he and Keith saw the milo plants, looking like tiny green whiskers, pushing out of the face of the earth. There was no doubt he would have to resow most of the fields close to the trailer, but the milo had survived. Maybe it was time to strap Keith in the big John Deere as his father had once done with him so long ago. Don would put his son in the seat, point out the levers, and show him the hare and tortoise symbols John Deere uses to indicate fast and slow. He thought how his small blond head would look like a lemon bobbing around in the expanse of the big cab.
As it had been done through the ages, Don Wagner would soon pass on to his son the love of the land, the mysteries and rituals of growing wheat, the lessons of the world not as chaos but as God’s will done. And blest be, Don would think, the tie that binds.
* TRO© (renewed 1968), 1950 (renewed 1978), and 1951. Folkways Music Publishers, Inc. New York. Used by permission.
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