Star-Journbal Editor
Two men parked their pick-ups outside the co-op in Hillsboro this past week.
One of them was a farmer.
The other, obviously not.
"Whatcha been doing?" the non-farmer asked.
"Getting ready for harvest," the farmer replied, quickening his stride to get inside.
"Bet your gonna be busy this year!"
"You've got that right."
As the farmer pushed through the door, the non-farmer called out, "Well, I'd be calling in sick if I were you!"
Wheat producers, elevator operators, equipment parts managers — the entire agricultural community — was in a hurry last week, getting ready for the wheat harvest, expected to begin this week in Marion County.
It's a safe bet that none of them were even thinking about calling in sick.
Especially not this year.
Two truckloads of grain arrived Monday at Cooperative Grain and Supply elevator in Hillsboro, which was early, even for an early harvest, officials said.
The harvest is expected to be in full swing this weekend.
Abnormally hot weather in May helped wheat mature several days ahead of schedule in Marion County, and the two loads brought in by Stanley Eitzen, Hillsboro, was of a variety of early-maturing wheat, according to Dick Tippin, grain coordinator for Cooperative Grain and Supply, Inc., of Hillsboro.
"We did get some wheat in, though," Tippin said. "And that's always a good sign."
The co-ops at Peabody and Marion also received wheat, which tested dry and had good test weight.
The price?
Way up, everywhere.
This time last year, the average price of wheat locally was about $3.15 a bushel. The market closed Monday at Hillsboro with a price of $4.58.
The 2006 Kansas wheat harvest started in the southern part of the state, near Oklahoma last week. It will progress north and west to Colorado and Nebraska. The harvest is usually finished by mid-July.
The official forecast for the state of Kansas is 320 million bushels, but ag experts say that estimate is too high.
If the harvest comes up short, higher prices are likely to hold throughout the harvest period.
Which means even an average crop, which is expected locally, will pay handsomely.
Signs of a coming wheat shortage brought on by drought conditions in Texas and Oklahoma, along with major frost damage in Russia, have caused wheat market prices to soar.
Prices have been so good, in fact, that several local farmers have signed forward-pricing contracts, assuring paydays for future crops of more than $4 a bushel through 2007, and even 2008.
Selling two years ahead of time is unheard of, according to Lyman Adams, Jr., president of Cooperative Grain and Supply, Hillsboro.
"In 30 years, I've never seen anything like it," Adams said.
A farm family gets ready
Lyle Suderman, 52, who farms southeast of Hillsboro with his brother, Don, and Don's son, Kevin, will harvest about 800 acres of wheat.
Lyle was in line at Ag-Power, Inc., parts department last week. He was picking up a bolt to fix a tractor while he still had time.
When harvest begins, Suderman will be working nonstop 12-14 hour days.
As optimistic as farmers are about a successful harvest, nothing is certain until the crop is in the bin.
A cautionary tale dressed in overalls, a farmer in line in front of Suderman at the parts store said his crop in northern Marion County had been hailed out in a recent storm. The store got pretty quiet after the sad farmer shut the door.
The H-word is rarely mentioned in polite company, but farmers are painfully aware that hail still could ruin everything they've hoped for.
With all of their modern equipment, farmers still rely on a test perhaps thousands of years old to tell when its time to harvest.
"You take a few head and kind of rub them between your hands," Suderman said. "When it has a pretty good crunch to it, you know it's time to start."
When the time is right, farmers will be bringing in their sheaves as soon as they possibly can.
"We like to get a day or two head start on it at the very beginning, even if we get a little bit of a dock for moisture," Suderman said.
The first loads of grain brought in to the Hillsboro elevator tested at 14.3 percent moisture and weighed 61 pounds per bushel.
(Fourteen percent moisture is considered sufficiently dry; and 60 pounds is considered full test weight).
"Like the guy here was saying, they got hailed out. If you're in the middle of a harvest and a storm comes up, a couple of percentage points docked for moisture is pretty cheap compared to a hailstorm."
Timing and preparation is all-important for a successful harvest. That's why there was only one combine in the big repair garage at Ag-Power last week. The rest of the Gleaners were made ready in downtime this winter.
Still, parts service manager, Kim Hill, had no time to talk. He was too busy filling orders for his customers, and opening more boxes of belts, hoses, and gears.
For more than 20 years, he's prepared for the harvest by over-stocking his shelves with most anything that a farmer might need to fix his combine.
Hill's parts department will be open until 9 p.m. during the harvest, as well as on Sunday afternoons. Broken-down farmers in a pinch for a spare part will call day or night, even at his home. Hill does his best to get them going again.
Out on the Suderman farm, Lyle's wife, Julie, was preparing for the harvest like she has for more than 25 years. But she says the notion that farmers' wives still bring huge baskets of food out to the field is a scene more likely found in a Norman Rockwell painting than real life.
Julie will cook plenty of meals, but the guys will come back to the farmhouse to eat.
Today's farm wife will probably spend more time helping coordinate deliveries to the elevator on two-way radios or cell phones than baking apple pies.
"The average farm wife's role has changed, and a lot of it has to do with technology, Julie said. "Stopping to rest isn't as important as it used to be. And the guys aren't doing nearly as much physical work.
"But I'm probably not the typical farm wife you should be talking to," said Lisa, who works in the admissions department at Tabor College.
"I grew up on the beach in southern California."
Air-conditioned combines cutting huge swaths at a time make harvests less strenuous than in yesteryears, when Lyle was a kid growing up on the family farm. The biggest difference in farming today is the speed and performance of the equipment.
"When I was a kid and it was wet, we'd say, 'Well, we've got this one hill we can go cut on for the afternoon.' It might have been a 10 or 15 acre hill, and it might have taken us the rest of the afternoon.
"Today we could cut that much in an hour."
But as the seasons have changed, the price of equipment, oil, and labor has gotten more expensive.
That's why farmers like Suderman are happy, but not giddy, about higher wheat prices. They'll tell you that it's about time the price of grain began to catch up with the rising cost of everything else.
The Suderman brothers were working in their greasy workshop last week, repairing a broken tractor seat with scrap iron. Buying a new seat for an old tractor was out of the question.
"Farming is like everything else, margins are shrinking," Lyle said. "To get the same bottom line you've got to do something to keep expenses down."
But as long as high wheat prices continue, he says, you can be sure farmers will be busy doing everything they can to increase future yields.
"They'll be planting fence row to fence row this fall," he said.
