On the high plains of western Kansas, the horizon is ruler-straight and unobstructed, save for the occasional grain elevator, wind farm, or cell tower jutting into the sky. It’s a topography that shares an uncanny similarity with the surface of the sea. Drive south along State Highway 27, the last paved road before the Colorado line, and you’ll see what I mean. The best time of year to go is late spring, when the endless fields of wheat that blanket the region are close to harvest and, on windy days, undulate like ocean swells. Pick any field. Walk out into it. Close your eyes and listen. You’ll hear the sound of gentle waves lapping against a beach.
Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to be. In June, I followed David Schemm, a fourth-generation wheat farmer, as he climbed over a barbed-wire fence and into one of his fields. David is fifty-one years old. He has a long goatee and a sturdy build. He walked about fifty feet into shin-high wheat, paused, and shook his head. “Not looking very good,” he said, with a slight drawl. In recent seasons, the field had averaged thirty-five to forty bushels an acre. This year, David said, it would likely yield fifteen to twenty, because of how dry the weather had been. He plucked a head from its stem and rubbed it between his hands, threshing out the seeds, one of which he popped into his mouth and bit down on with his back teeth. “Hear that hard crack?” he asked. “That’s what you want. That’s how you know the wheat is ready.” When we got back to his truck, he did a quick yield calculation on his phone. “Seventeen bushels,” he said with a sigh.
David, his wife, Lisa, and their twenty-six-year-old son, Clay, farm twelve thousand acres spread over three counties on the far-western edge of Kansas—so far west that two of the counties are on Mountain Time. Like most row-crop farmers in the region, they also grow corn and milo. As David and I drove around in his Ford F-250, trying to figure out which fields were ready to harvest, he told me how stressful the past several months had been. The price of diesel had almost doubled just in the past year, and fertilizer prices were as much as four times higher than they’d been two years ago. Then there were the travelling harvesters, called “custom cutters,” who were charging the Schemms thirty-three-per-cent more than they did last season to help offset their own rising costs. “It feels like we’ve been pulled into a high-stakes poker game,” David said. “What happens if we have a crop failure or prices crash? It’s a scary time.”
I’d met the Schemms five weeks earlier, at the sixty-fourth annual Hard Winter Wheat Tour. Put on by the Wheat Quality Council, the tour is a two-and-a-half-day road trip across Kansas, which produces more winter wheat than any other state in the country. This year, there were more than eighty participants, including farmers, agronomists, flour millers, lobbyists, commodity traders, and officials from the United States Department of Agriculture. The night before the tour began, a risk manager for a company with a portfolio of nearly thirty-two thousand restaurants around the world said out loud what many others seemed to be thinking: “We’re here to just kind of see how bad it is.”
There was ample reason for pessimism. In March, the Governor of Kansas, Laura Kelly, had placed each of the state’s hundred and five counties under a drought watch, warning, or emergency. Kansas had received about half its normal rainfall; the southwestern corner of the state, where the drought was especially severe, had received forty-two per cent. Average annual rainfall for that region is about a foot. Since last fall, when the wheat was planted, through early May, the area had received less than an inch. These numbers led the U.S.D.A. to predict, in a report issued on May 12th, that Kansas would produce roughly three-quarters of last year’s harvest.
Kansas sends about half its wheat to other countries, and the U.S.D.A.’s gloomy forecast arrived at a time when the global supply was already under enormous strain. Most of the blame goes to Russia for invading Ukraine. Those two nations, along with the U.S., are among the top five wheat exporters in the world. Floods in China and a heat wave in India—the world’s two largest wheat producers, if relatively small exporters—made things worse. According to the U.S.D.A., global wheat production was likely to fall for the first time in four years, down four million tons from 2021. World leaders began to fear widespread famine in countries across North Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East. “Global hunger levels are at a new high,” the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, said on May 18th. Without urgent international action, he warned, “we face the spectre of a global food shortage in the coming months.”
Less wheat means higher prices—hardly a bad thing from the perspective of farmers in Kansas. The Hard Winter Wheat Tour began the day before Guterres’s remarks, as the cost of wheat reached near-record highs. At dinner one night, Lisa Schemm pulled out her phone to check the latest price at her local grain elevator, in Sharon Springs. “Right now the price is $12.99 a bushel,” she said, sounding excited. (It usually fluctuates between five and six dollars a bushel.) Although the lack of rain meant that her family farm was all but certain to have a smaller harvest this year—thirty to forty-five bushels an acre instead of the usual sixty—she hoped that the soaring prices would help make up for it. Plenty of farmers would not be nearly as lucky. “It’s great if prices are high,” Doug Bounds, the U.S.D.A.’s statistician for Kansas, told me. “But only if you have wheat to sell.”
On the second day of the tour, I found myself on Highway 27 heading south toward Johnson City, which has one Dollar General and zero stoplights. I was in the car with Dave Green, the Wheat Quality Council’s executive vice-president. Green, who has short, white hair and broad shoulders, worked as a chemist at a flour mill in Columbus, Ohio, and later as the director of quality control for the agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland in Kansas City, before retiring in 2017. He’s been in the wheat industry for forty-four years and went on his first wheat tour in 1980. Back then, it was a more impromptu affair. “A guy gets up on the back of a pickup truck at eight o’clock on a Monday and says, ‘I think we’ve got enough drivers. I’ll see everybody in Liberal,’ ” he said. “It was just a circus.” In 1993, Green started to organize the tour by formalizing routes, designating car assignments, and introducing a standard method for calculating yields, the tour’s main project.
Armed with wooden yardsticks, participants ride three or four to a car and stop at random fields along assigned routes, collecting measurements such as the distance between rows and the number of wheat heads per foot. For each field, these measurements are averaged and plugged into an equation to come up with an estimated yield. The system works well for fields with full and even rows. It’s less useful for the ones we saw near Johnson City, which were bone-dry and half barren. The wheat that remained on one such field had begun to yellow at the base of the stem, a sign of drought stress. “This is where the yield formula doesn’t help you at all,” Green said. He predicted that whoever owned the field would be lucky to get ten to fifteen bushels an acre. There was no point in trying to measure it, so we got back in the car. Next to the highway, just outside town, was a golf course. As we drove past, I noticed that its sprinklers were on.
Water in western Kansas has always been scarce, but it is becoming scarcer. In recent decades, thousands of wells have run dry. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has declared that parts of the Ogallala Aquifer, which underlies much of the Great Plains, “should be considered a nonrenewable resource.” Scientists warn that a confluence of factors could lead to more extreme weather on the Plains in the coming decades. One study, published in 2020, found that levels of windblown dust in many areas have doubled during the past twenty years. Another predicted that current rates of greenhouse-gas emissions will turn the once-in-a-century heat wave of 1936, the hottest year of the Dust Bowl, into a once-every-forty-years event. (In June, more than two thousand cows died in southwestern Kansas after temperatures spiked above a hundred degrees.)
None of this bodes well for wheat production. Scientists have found that yields could fall by up to twenty-one per cent for every one-degree-Celsius increase in temperature. A study led by researchers from Columbia University’s Earth Institute estimates that, if Dust Bowl conditions return, the U.S. would exhaust ninety-four per cent of its wheat reserves in four years, reducing the worldwide stockpile by nearly a third. Climate change increases the likelihood of “simultaneous production losses in major producing countries.” International trade would break down, and people would begin to starve.
Aside from a few irrigated fields, the wheat didn’t get any better as the tour made its way east, on Route 160. In Meade, population fourteen hundred, we met up with a local reporter from Great Plains Christian Radio, who followed us to our next field, a few miles east of town. It was among the driest we had seen. “This is a disaster,” Green said, as he bent down to inspect a row of shrivelled plants. “There’s no getting around that. This is a crop failure here.” The reporter asked for predictions about this year’s harvest. Green deployed some “could-be-worse” hopefulness, but by the end of the day his outlook had soured. He turned to Justin Gilpin, the C.E.O. of Kansas Wheat, an advocacy group for farmers in the state, and offered a blunter assessment than he’d given to Christian radio: “I tell you what—that wheat out in southwestern Kansas is some kind of shitty.”
On June 22nd, I drove out to see the Schemms, whose twelve thousand acres are divided into fifty-eight fields. Their smallest field is fifty acres; the largest is eight hundred and forty. Each one has a name, usually borrowed from the field’s previous owner: Baehler, Heyen, Fogelman, and so on. Others they named after nearby landmarks. Seaboard is situated down the road from Seaboard Feeders, a hog farm, and Overpass sits next to a highway. A few have more personal names. Homestead is the first field David’s grandfather farmed, in 1920. It’s the oldest one the Schemms have.
When David’s grandfather was twenty-one years old, his father offered him a hundred and sixty acres that he owned near Sharon Springs. The land was almost a hundred miles west of where they lived, but David’s grandfather didn’t seem to mind. He was eager to start a farm of his own, so he loaded up his Case Wallis tractor and headed off. The drive took two days. For the next couple of years, he lived in a hillside dugout with his wife and children. (David’s father, born in 1934, was one of five boys, the first of whom died at birth.) The family later moved into a modest ranch house that David’s grandfather had ordered from a Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogue. They waited out the Dust Bowl in that house. Growing up, David remembers hearing his grandmother tell stories about draping a wet tea towel over his father’s crib.
David’s father eventually took over the farm, and then David, after getting a degree in theology from a small Christian college in Texas, where he met Lisa, took it over from him. His son Clay plans to take it over next. Everyone had expected Clay’s younger brother, Luke, who loved farming, to do that; by the time he was a senior in high school, in 2015, Luke had already picked out the first piece of land he wanted to buy. But, later that year, Luke, a running back, collapsed on his school’s football field during a playoff game. He was airlifted to a hospital in Denver, where doctors discovered that his brain was bleeding and swelling. Early the next morning, his family made the decision to take him off life support. Three months later, they bought the field he had wanted. They named it Luke’s.
At the time, Clay was a sophomore studying chemistry and German at Kansas State University. The following semester, he switched to biological and agricultural engineering. Three years later, he returned to the farm. He told me that his parents hadn’t pressured him into it, and he seemed genuinely happy to have avoided office work. “Farmers are the ultimate Jacks-of-all-trades,” he said, as I watched him reseat a plow tire, using an aerosol brake cleaner and a lighter. Still, he doesn’t always enjoy it, especially when equipment breaks down during the wheat harvest. “Sometimes you just want to light your combine on fire and be done,” he told me one morning. When the harvest is in full swing, he said, he and his parents will often work in the fields until ten or eleven at night. In addition to the custom cutters, they had also hired a local high-school teacher and her daughter as seasonal help. They were family friends; the teacher’s brother-in-law had been Luke’s football coach.
The Schemms harvested their first eighty acres a few days before I arrived. The cutters would help get the wheat out of their remaining thirty-three hundred acres as quickly as possible. Early summer is thunderstorm season in western Kansas, and each storm brings with it the chance of hail; in past years, the Schemms have lost as many as ten thousand bushels in a night to what farmers call the “great white combine.”
Wheat prices had already begun to drop from their May peak. By the end of June, they would fall below nine dollars a bushel, their lowest level in four months, and David was growing anxious to get this year’s harvest over and done with—each price drop cut into their already slim profit margins. Meanwhile, rising interest rates stretched the credit lines funding their fuel and maintenance expenses. (If prices dropped below $7.25, it might make more sense to abandon low-yielding fields and take an insurance payout.) The weather forecast didn’t help: scattered thunderstorms were expected for the next several days. Wheat needs to be below a certain moisture level before it can be harvested; an inopportune downpour could set them back days, to say nothing of the threat of hail. Crisscrossing the countryside one afternoon, we moved through several rain showers, each one of which caused David to look warily up at the sky.
Toward the end of the day, we drove to where the cutters were working, in the Schemms’ easternmost field. It had received just enough rain for the wheat to grow thick and lush, and David expected the field to produce some of their highest yields. “This is the best dryland field I’ve cut all year,” Will Harding, one of the crew chiefs for the cutters, told me, from the driver’s seat of his combine. He had invited me into the cab so that he could talk and work at the same time. Harding had been on the road since the third week of May, when the wheat harvest in Texas, his home state, got under way. He said that the wheat hadn’t been much to look at during the previous month. The worst he’d seen was east of Johnson City, where he’d helped harvest just four thousand of the fourteen thousand total acres that a farmer had planted last fall. The rest had been abandoned.
For David, the need for a good harvest felt like a moral imperative as much as a financial one. He’d been following the news out of Ukraine since the war started, on February 24th, and he had only contempt for Vladimir Putin’s invasion. “He’s using food as a weapon,” he told me over lunch one afternoon. We had been talking about Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea and a recent missile strike that had destroyed a food warehouse in Odesa. He said that, with millions of tons of wheat stuck in Ukraine, it was up to farmers like him to help fill the gap. (In 2021, Ukraine accounted for ten per cent of global wheat exports. The U.S.D.A. predicts that its share this year will be cut in half.) “That’s honestly what’s weighing on me more than anything,” he said. He quoted Norman Borlaug, an agronomist who, in 1970, won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in developing highly productive varieties of wheat, and once said, “You can’t build a peaceful world on empty stomachs.” Then he finished eating and went to repair a combine head.
Three days after I arrived in Sharon Springs, the first of the fields that the Schemms hadn’t assigned to the custom cutters was dry enough to harvest. Lisa got started at eleven in the morning. I joined her and her Maltese, Pixie, in one of the family’s two combines, which had dozens of rotating parts that produced a constant, low-pitched hum. Lisa drove slowly, between five and six miles per hour, as the combine’s forty-foot-wide draper head cut the wheat with sickles that looked like oversized shark teeth. The wheat then passed through a fast-spinning cylinder behind the cab, which threshed it before sending it through a series of sieves that separated the grain from the chaff. As we made our way across the rows, bumping over the occasional badger den, Lisa said that the field was likely to be one of their worst. A real-time yield monitor in the cab showed it averaging nine bushels an acre. “This is a hammer-it-out field,” Lisa said. Heavy clouds were moving in from the northwest, and every so often we would hear storm chasers on her two-way radio. Their frequent references to “rain shafts” made Lisa even more eager to finish, and, just before six, she finally did. David was waiting for her on the edge of the field, having just checked a few others. Lisa climbed down from the combine with Pixie in one arm.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“We’re still two days out,” David said. “I think Hileman will go next.”
“So, it’s hurry up and wait,” she said.
“Like Granddad used to say,” he said. “When the wheat looks ready, I’ll take a weeklong fishing trip.”
The next morning, David used a semi truck to deliver the wheat that Lisa had harvested to the grain elevator in Sharon Springs. From there, it would be loaded onto train cars and shipped across the country—or maybe across the world, to the places that needed it most.
A couple of weeks later, after the Schemms cut their last field, I called David to see how the rest of their harvest had gone. “I wish it could’ve been better, to help offset more of our costs,” he said. “But I’m not going to complain too much.” Lisa told me in an e-mail that they felt “extremely blessed,” given the circumstances. Statewide, the outlook had only grown worse. On July 12th, the U.S.D.A. lowered its May estimate by an additional 3.85 million bushels. Meanwhile, in Istanbul, Ukrainian and Russian negotiators were trying to reach a deal to release the grain stuck in ports along the Black Sea.
Though summer thunderstorms had provided some reprieve, much of western Kansas remained in extreme drought. On my drive home from Sharon Springs, I saw acres of dry, cracked ground—fields of wheat that had been abandoned or plowed under. Lisa had called the prospects for the upcoming fall crop “dismal.” When I drove past the golf course near Johnson City, its sprinklers were running again. ♦
