FARMERS: Frank Anderson’s Wheat

Across the Kansas plain great puffs of whitish dust erupted into the shimmering heat. Inside these clouds the ponderous combines roared and clanked, their reel slats flashing as they flailed through the knee-high wheat. In the No. 1 wheat state of the world’s greatest wheat-producing nation, it was harvest time.

Like a swarm of antennaed monsters, the combines of the itinerant harvesters had followed the ripening grain northward through Texas and Oklahoma. Now, from the eastern foothills of the Rockies along the hundreds of miles of plains to the Missouri River, they worked in ripening fields alongside the farmers who had planted it. Wheat was in the air; it was in the eyes and hair and the hearts and minds of almost everyone.

It was good wheat, and another bumper crop. Nature had been kind, but she had first tried men’s nerves. There had been winter drought, even several dire days of dust storms. Then soaking rains and an abnormally warm March had sprouted the green shoots in a hurry (TIME, April 22). Then there was another dry spell and again the blessed rains, just in time.

Now the harvest; by next week Kansas farmers will have reaped about 215,000,000 bushels of wheat—one-fifth of the nation’s estimated crop, four-fifths of the wheat the U.S. has pledged to the world’s hunger areas in the coming crop year.

Some of the best Kansas wheatlands are in Ford County, in the state’s southwest corner. Some of Ford County’s best wheat land—600 acres of it—is on Franklin Oliver Anderson’s farm, about six miles out from Dodge City, south of the airport on Rural Route 3. At 51, Franklin Anderson is lean and hard, chocolate-browned by the sun and wind. His farm is his pride, and rightly. He has no debts; his house, unlike the typical Kansas brown frame, is a cheery, red-roofed, red-shuttered white stucco behind a spic-&-span white picket fence. Frank Anderson is a successful man.

This was his 37th winter wheat harvest on this land; he has never missed one since, at 15, he went to work these fields with his father. Now his 19-year-old son, Franklin III (Jack to everyone except his parents), was there to help. The Navy had given him a 20-day harvest leave.

One Day Last Week. Farmer Anderson woke just before 5 a.m. As he looked out over his unreaped acres he could see the wheat heads nodding to the cool morning. He called his wife, Zula, to get up and get breakfast going. He slipped out of his cotton nightshirt and into shorts, faded blue work shirt, grease-stained overalls and high, heavy shoes. On the back porch he sloshed water on his face, groped for the roller towel. In the next 15 minutes he had milked the cow and got Jack up. Then he went to the small bunkhouse and woke his two harvest hands: 36-year-old Harold Robb and 18-year-old Fay Everett.

Breakfast did not take long. Frank had three eggs, half a dozen strips of home-cured bacon, four pieces of toast heavy with butter and jam, two cups of coffee. It was close to 7 o’clock when the four clattered off to the fields in the battered 1934 Dodge light truck.

The sun was high, already hot. Frank Anderson fingered the heads of several wheat plants. The morning dew was drying fast; soon it would be safe to start cutting. But first there was a lot of nursing to do on the two Anderson combines. They are old—one 17 years, the other 16. Every moving part had to be greased. Frank tried the baling wire that holds the slats together on one of them; he hoped it would last through another day.

By 8 o’clock everything was ready to roll. Fay Everett got into the saddle of the 17-year-old tractor that pulls the bigger combine. Frank Anderson cranked the combine’s engine and the morning’s vast silence was filled with chugging and the swish of churning slats. Frank stood atop the combine, guiding the pitch and height of its 16-foot reel as it chewed at the stalks. Now there were other sounds: the roar of Jack Anderson’s tractor as he swung the smaller combine in behind his father’s, and the low, steady purr of kernels pouring into the combines’ bins.

Private Elevator. Slowly (5 m.p.h.) the Andersons went round & round the 80-acre field, cutting the golden stalks to beige stubble. Once an hour they stopped and Harold Robb came alongside with the truck. Into it spilled about 70 bushels of grain from each machine. Harold Robb drove the truck back to the barn. There Frank Anderson had built a private elevator (capacity 12,000 bushels), with cemented interior and motored conveyor.

At noon Frank Anderson called a halt. His shirt and overalls were mushy with sweat, dust and chaff. At the house plump, jolly Zula Anderson had everything on the table the minute the men finished at the back-porch sink—fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, corn, tomatoes, beets, bread & butter, milk, iced tea.

Forty-five minutes later the men were on their way back to the field.

The sun goes down in Ford County these days at about 7 o’clock, but there is light enough for another hour of work. By 8 o’clock, after the tarpaulins had been thrown over the engines, Frank Anderson and his helpers were too tired to talk about being tired. Back at the barn, Frank milked again, while Jack fed the horse and slopped the pigs. Then the men fell to Zula’s thick round steak, fried potatoes, tomatoes, lemon-meringue pie.

After supper Frank Anderson let himself down in his easy chair. No, he couldn’t kick. This was fine, hard wheat—Class One, every bit of it. His 600 acres would yield about 8,000 bushels. At last week’s elevator price of $1.70 a bushel, that would mean about $13,600 to him.

High Price of Success. But not right away. Farmer Anderson is also a hard-headed businessman and he is not going to sell his wheat right now—not before January if he can help it. That is one reason why he built his own elevator. What about the Government’s order to farmers to sell half the grain they bring in for storage? The stock answer of Ford County farmers: “Nuts to that.” If the Government tried to put a penalty on everybody who does not comply, it would have to move against about 95% of the wheat belt’s farmers.

Frank Anderson’s decision to hold his wheat has nothing to do with that order against withholding wheat for “famine prices.” As a matter of fact, he thought the $1.70-a-bushel ceiling under OPA was a mighty fair price.

His trouble and the trouble of all good wheat farmers is success. Last year he cleared $10,000. So far this year he has sold $15,000 worth of wheat and cattle. Said he: “I know there are people starving in Europe, and I’d like to help them. But this is a business. If I sell even half of $13,600 worth of wheat I’ll get into a higher income bracket and my tax will go sky-high.* Besides, I’ve got to stay in business; I’ve got to hold a lot of wheat as insurance against a poor crop next year.” In rich Ford County it was a good guess that nine out of ten of his neighbors were in Frank Anderson’s fortunate fix and had made the same decision.

It was 9:45 p.m. and Anderson’s frank, blue eyes were heavy with weariness. Ahead of him were more days like this one and the dozen that had preceded it. He stretched his wiry arms, scratched his thinning brown hair and allowed that he had better get to bed. He sighed: “It’s beginning to catch up with me. These last few years have been awfully hard. I’m tired, all my machinery is tired, and my land is tired. Sometimes I wish I could take it easy. I’m tired of worrying.”

*Last week Internal Revenue agents completed a check of Kansas farmers’ returns, harvested about $1,000,000 in additional income taxes, found many farmers had cached large sums of cash.