Al Gustin

After decades of government acreage controls and depressed grain prices, the 1972 Soviet grain deal changed everything, or so it seemed. The Soviets bought 10 million tons of U.S. grain, mainly wheat and corn. Farmers were led to believe a new era was dawning, an era of strong global demand and higher prices. Wheat prices went from $1.75 a bushel to $4.08 in one year.

With the huge increase in sunflower production came a race of sorts to see who would build the processing plants to handle that production. Companies or private investors who announced early, it was felt, would have a leg up and better chance of survival than others who were not as aggressive.

On Sept. 26 this year, I interviewed a farmer near Beulah who had been unable to harvest his wheat. The wheat was ready for harvest on Labor Day, but had received more than 7 inches of rain during the first three weeks of September. The kernels were discolored and sprouting. Its only value was for feed.

Many areas of the state have had twice or three times the average growing season rainfall. But rainfall totals don’t tell the whole story. There have simply been too many wet days and not enough drying days.

I recall doing a report in northern South Dakota, during the severe 2006 drought. The story was about a cattleman who was forced to haul water to his cattle. His dams had gone dry. We were there as he drove up to fill the tank. The cows heard him, and they came across the pasture, a pasture that was brown, not green. Their hooves kicked up dust. There was no way I could have described the scene for the audience that would have had the lasting impact the TV video did.

It seems that in my youth, August was a hot, dry month. Crops had ripened. It was the month of harvest. But in early August last year, someone commented how green the countryside looked. I replied that the abundance of fall crops was one reason for that.

In 1955, R. J. McGinnis wrote a not-so-politically-correct essay titled, “A Farmer Takes a Wife.” Among other things, he wrote: “She should not mind the breeze from a trench silo, which wafts into the house, nor by the continuous parade of newborn pigs and lambs by the kitchen stove.”

“If she’s farm-reared,” McGinnis wrote, “she won’t be shocked by the little things that are always coming up, like finding a dead cat in the cistern or wheat chaff in the bed.”

When agriculture became mechanized and gas-powered tractors replaced animal power, that changed. Energy became an expense.

In March 1980, we went south of New Salem to Chuck Bahm’s farm, where he was demonstrating the use of sunflower oil in diesel engines. Bahm’s vision, and the vision of many at that time, was of an agricultural industry that produced food, fiber and fuel, just as had been the case when animals provided the power.