TIMES ARE CHANGING

Had the wheat not developed a blight in Iowa, it would probably still be grown here today.

Even when the blight came farmers were reluctant to give up on it. Herbert Quick described the dilemma of the wheat farmer in his book One Man’s Life.

”We grew wonderful wheat at first; the only problem was to get it to market and to live on the proceeds when it was sold. My father hauled his wheat from the Iowa River to Waterloo, and even to Iowa City, when it was the rail head for our part of the country; hauled it slowly over mere trails across the prairie. It took him three days to market a load of wheat in Waterloo…

“But the worst, however, was yet to come. A harvest came when we found that something was wrong with the wheat. No longer did the stalks stand clean and green as of old until they went golden in the sun. The broad green blades were spotted red and black with rust. Still it grew tall and rank; but as it matured it showed signs of disease. The heads did not fill well. Some blight was at work on it. However, we thought next year all would be well again. And when it grew worse year by year, it became a blight not only on the life of the grain but on human live as well. Wheat was almost our sole cash crop. If it failed, what should we do? And it was failing.”

“We were incurring, of course the penalty for a one-crop system. We ought to have known that it was inevitable. Yet even the agricultural experts did not know what was the trouble until a quarter of a century
afterward; when it was worked out, I believe, by the scientists of the North Dakota Collage of Agriculture. Preying on the wheat were fungi, bacteria and molds. We sowed wheat after wheat until every field became a culture bed for every antagonistic organism; but instead of finding a remedy, we were only amazed and driven to despair by the calamity.”

“Some of our people thought that one crop of wheat after another had robbed the soil of some necessary property; but my father pointed out the fact that not even on newly broken sod could good wheat now
be grown. It must be something else. Maybe the climate had changed. If it had, why it would change back next year. So we went on, as farmers nearly always do, sticking to the system which had become established. The new breaking, we now know, had become infected with the wheat diseases from the surrounding fields; or the infections were blown to it by the winds.”

It was difficult for the farmer to give up on wheat, and took many years to disappear from the farms of Iowa. Quick observed that, “The Manufacturer can shut down when the market is bad, or specialize for a few weeks or months on a thing that pays. The business man may slow up on purchases and narrow his operations, pursuing one policy one month and making a change the next, always trying things out in a small way and feeling his projects out. But the farmer’s experiment always takes a year and involves so great a loss in case of bad judgment or misfortune that he perforce became very conservative. We were so in our devotion to wheat.”