Waiting on the Sky

FOOD

Waiting on the Sky

The gold was there in the heavy-headed grain that was ripening across the whole west half of Kansas. Now it all hung on the weather. Each night the Kansas far mers and their wives went off to bed only after a last worried look at the sky; each morning they hurried out to scan the skies again, to put a speculative finger to the wind. Two more weeks of good weather, not too hot, and above all, no rain, would bring the lushest wheat harvest in a decade.

In Ford County, on the fringe of the onetime dust bowl, ten million bushels of wheat were in fabulous prospect. So far everything was wonderful; the waving golden ocean of wheat had been estimated on May i at 150,000,000 bu. for all Kan sas; by June 1 the crop looked more like 165,000,000 bu. 20,000,000 bu. more than last year. By night, with stubby pencils the Ford County farmers reckoned their profits, at a bumper prospect of 30 bu. an acre. They figured they would get $1.50 a bu., biggest price in a good year since 1919. By day, the farmers fretted over the things that could go wrong. Hail storms or heavy rain could lay whole fields flat. A spell of 100-degree heat might cause the grain to shatter. Some times insects scourged the land just before the harvest.

The farmers weighed their fears with their dreams. To tempt farm hands back from war plants they were offering $7 to $12 a day, plus room and bountiful board. They sent out calls for thousands of Italian and German prisoners to work the fields. They counted on the help of clerks and storekeepers in the towns, who will lay off at noon and head for the dusty fields. They needed women and teen-age kids to man the roaring tractors, to drive the heavy grain trucks to the elevators and even to operate some of the big combines.

Harvest Army. Already the wide north ward sweep of the harvest has begun in Texas and Oklahoma and is moving for ward like an army with its flanks spread wide. By late June it will reach Kansas, then thresh slowly up from the heartland of the U.S., until by September it spends itself on the windy prairies of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.

Moving with the harvest are thousands of workers. Sometimes a man, his wife and a daughter old enough to drive a truck operate a single traveling combine. But other migratory crews are big enough to include a fleet of truckers, factory-trained combine repairmen and rolling cookshacks. Corps of "semi-pro" harvest ers move from field to field "custom combining" the wheat at $3 & up an acre, operating fleets of new, self-propelled combines, each able to cut 50 acres of grain a day. Their work plans are as precise as army logistics; their bookings and daily routings are scheduled like traveling theater companies.

In Kansas, all is in readiness for them. But whether they will find golden, waist-high fields, and grain heads 3 to 3 inches long depends on whether the Kansas sky stays soft and blue.

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