Section A · Page 8
The University Daily Kansan
Wednesday, June 21, 2000
How do wheat farmers know when it's time to harvest? Responses from Hamilton County farmers include:
*The grain is a certain color of red.
*The fields make more noise when they're dry and ripe.
*The wheat heads will lean over when they're ready.
*You can bite the berry and if it's soft at all,it's not ready.
لأغلب الحالات لا يوجد ضمانات لنقل البيانات.
Photo by Phil Cauthon/KANSAN
Wheat farmers stick it out despite low profits
Continued from page 1A
"That's an 80-percent chance of not raining," Lampe remarked, still attuned to the report.
Rain would be good for the county's budding corn and milo crops, but a storm could be devastating to the wheat.
Custom cutters
As the cost of harvest equipment has crept up, so has an entire industry built around maximizing the productivity of expensive, high-tech combines.
Fleets of so-called custom cutters travel from Arizona to Montana, harvesting wheat wherever they can find work. Like any harvest work, custom cutters' hours are from about 10 a.m — or as soon as the morning dew dissipates — to several hours past sunset. And instead of the individual farmer's typical two-week harvest, their harvest season starts in early May and doesn't end until late September.
But even after maximizing the hours eked out of his equipment, Lon Wurz's custom cutting business has just as tight a profit margin as the farmers themselves.
"In the whole harvest industry, everybody's kind of looking over their shoulder as to whether it's time to bail out or if we're going to ride this dead horse into the ground," said Wurz, now on his 28th harvest.
"Balling out is probably the intelligent thing to do. But this is what I am. This is my form of identity. It's what I want. It's what I want to do. But it just ain't working. It's taken me a lifetime to figure this out. I know I should quit, but I probably won't." he said.
Wurz sees the most viable solution to the American farm's predicament in expanded overseas markets.
"When I was a little boy, I remember my dad saying, 'We're the breadbasket of the world. We feed the world, and we need to be proud of that.' He was right," Wurz said.
"But the rest of the world is farming now, and if something doesn't change pretty soon, I'm not sure we'll be needed anymore."
7:30 p.m. June 15 — Looming on the northwestern horizon, billows of towering clouds give Hamilton County farmers about two hours' notice of the approaching cold front.
The future's prospects
With China's imminent entrance into the World Trade Organization, American wheat farmers may yet avert Wurz's ominous forecast. With nearly 1.3 billion people to feed, China's market potentially could boost the price of wheat worldwide, easing the financial strain on Kansas wheat farmers.
Despite significant trade barriers, China imported $28.5 million in Kansas agricultural products in 1997, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Once China enters the WTO and those trade barriers are eased, agricultural exports to China should increase dramatically.
according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Web site.
In anticipation of expanding Asian markets, many Kansas farmers are experimenting with hard white winter wheat — a variety preferred for making Asian noodles, as well as tortillas.
For generations, hard red winter wheat has been the predominant crop in Kansas. But Kansas State University geneticists and agronomists have developed strains of white wheat suited to Kansas' climate and resistant to its pests.
For the most part, it will be a matter of enough Kansas farmers switching to this strain to make it worthwhile for elevators to isolate entire bins for the white variety, said John Phillips, an elevator manager near Kendall.
"Right now, with the kind of volume we handle, there just aren't enough farmers growing hard white wheat to justify separating it out," said Phillips, 43. "But we're already seeing that start to change, and it might not be long before
hard white takes over."
With the emergence of the white variety and expanding wheat markets, the threat to Kansas farms may soon subside.
As Lampe, Carter and Melvin all remember, wheat prices doubled to $5.60 a bushel during the mid-1970s, while the United States and Russia had a trade agreement that boosted U.S. wheat exports.
9:15 p.m. June 15 — As the sun drops below the horizon and the cold front's clouds settle over Hamilton County, scathing winds whip dust against the windows of Lampa's combine. The persistent winds refuse to subside, and a half hour from now Lampa will call it quits for the day. Too much wheat will be blown from the grain cart and turbulent conditions will make night harvest too difficult.
But for now Lamp and farmers around him can exhale: the cold front did not bring a wheat-killing storm and harvest will begin anew tomorrow.
—Edited by Mindie Miller
A narrow margin for profit, survival
Like farmers across the country, Jerry Lampe has had to cope with steadily rising costs, while wheat prices consistently hover around the same level they did 50 years ago when he began farming.
Skyrocketing diesel prices made this year's crop particularly costly to reap, running Lampe $500 to $600 per day to operate his harvest machinery from sunup to sundown. During ten days of harvest that adds up to about a $2,500 increase from last year's fuel costs.
Lampe's machinery — a three-year-old tractor, two well-worn trucks and a 1998 John Deere combine — amount to about $300,000 of overhead. Seed, fertilizer and pesticide typically total about $40 per acre.
Property taxes on his 1,500 acres in Hamilton county, leases on another 2,500 acres, labor costs and insurance each add thousands more to the annual cost of farming.
Those costs, combined with the stubbornly low selling price of wheat — $2.35 in western Kansas last week — balance out to an extremely narrow profit margin. An inch of rain literally can make the difference between profit and loss.
"This crop had potential for 60 bushels (per acre), but we didn't get the right kind of weather, and so we're running about 40 bushels," Lampe said. "It used to be that when you had a good crop, it'd carry you through the bad ones. Now you need a good crop just to survive. And this crop — this crop is break-even for us or less."
- By Phil Cauthon
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