This Was Wheat Farming

by Kirby Brumfield

Reach into the grain bin for a handful of wheat...and as it runs out through your fingers, so do more than 6000 years since wheat was grown in Persian Gulf lands. The story of this age-old, most extensive grain crop the world has ever seen, parallels that of mankind and author Kirby Brumfield makes the point clear. Wheat in the Northwest? Yes, it's all here, acres of it in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. The lore of the harvest is the keynote of Brumfield's presentation...the romance of growing and harvesting the crop, and the growing civilization of humanity, adept at improving its lot and more skilled at the mechanics of living...until in 1831 Cyrus McCormick demonstrated a reaper that revolutionized wheat harvesting. Brumfield approaches this vast subject with considerable facility and sows grains of interest in every paragraph. He lifts farming right out of the soil into fascinating history, with accent on the Northwest.

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 1968

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

If your family has roots in the wheat country of Washington and Oregon (or anywhere in the U.S., for that matter) then this book will give you a very good insight into what the pioneers of wheat farming dealt with to make a go of it in the early days of the wheat industry. Anchored in Washington and Oregon, the text and many photographs show how the methods, machines, and some of the culture of wheat farming evolved over the decades from the early nineteenth century.
My grandparents, having grown up in one of many wheat-farming Volga-German colonies in Russia, immigrated to north-central Washington around the time of World War I, put down their roots - and their wheat roots - and resumed farming. This book enables me to better understand and imagine what they experienced over the decades of their farming presence in NCW. The wells of courage and fortitude they drew upon are something to marvel about; they were made of very tough stuff. Today some of their grandsons and great-grandson continue the tradition.
A very good book for anyone curious about how their 19th & early 20th century ancestors farmed at a time when half, or more, of the American population, still lived on those farms.

[Howard Frisk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy driving through the rolling hills of wheatfields in the Palouse region of southeastern Washington State. This book is full of historical photographs of teams of horses pulling primitive farming equipment - stuff you could never see nowadays as all of that has been replaced by GPS guided self-leveling combines. Wheat farmers from the late 1800s would be flabbergasted to see the equipment that their descendants are using now, which can harvest in just a few hours what took them days of backbreaking labor. This book is a great history lessen. Many of the photographs of harvesting activities are from private collections that have never been published before. The captions and text in the book contain a wealth of information. The only drawback to the book is that the typeface is very small, which would make it difficult to to read from some people.