With millions of tons of grain stuck in Ukraine, some farmers in Kansas feel a moral dimension to this year’s harvest. “That’s honestly what’s weighing on me more than anything,” one wheat farmer said.
On the high plains of western Kansas, the horizon is ruler-straight and unobstructed, save for the occasional grain elevator, wind farm, or cell tower jutting into the sky. It’s a topography that shares an uncanny similarity with the surface of the sea. Drive south along State Highway 27, the last paved road before the Colorado line, and you’ll see what I mean.
I’d met the Schemms five weeks earlier, at the sixty-fourth annual Hard Winter Wheat Tour. Put on by the Wheat Quality Council, the tour is a two-and-a-half-day road trip across Kansas, which produces more winter wheat than any other state in the country. This year, there were more than eighty participants, including farmers, agronomists, flour millers, lobbyists, commodity traders, and officials from the United States Department of Agriculture.
Armed with wooden yardsticks, participants ride three or four to a car and stop at random fields along assigned routes, collecting measurements such as the distance between rows and the number of wheat heads per foot. For each field, these measurements are averaged and plugged into an equation to come up with an estimated yield. The system works well for fields with full and even rows. It’s less useful for the ones we saw near Johnson City, which were bone-dry and half barren.
On June 22nd, I drove out to see the Schemms, whose twelve thousand acres are divided into fifty-eight fields. Their smallest field is fifty acres; the largest is eight hundred and forty. Each one has a name, usually borrowed from the field’s previous owner: Baehler, Heyen, Fogelman, and so on. Others they named after nearby landmarks. Seaboard is situated down the road from Seaboard Feeders, a hog farm, and Overpass sits next to a highway. A few have more personal names.
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