Good evening District 27. Earlier this evening I returned from my rosary walk and saw some combines and hauling trucks parked by the Bennett County Fairgrounds (See my posted photos). It is that time of year when the custom harvesters from Kansas head north to harvest the spring wheat crop that is ripening as they head north into Canada. It is a busy time of year for harvesters who try to beat the rain and any likelihood that hail may destroy a spring wheat crop, which can happen more often than not from summer thunderstorms across the Northern Plains this time of year.
As I prayed my rosary, it brought back memories of when I grew up on our farm. We would harvest the oats crop with our pull-type combine hooked to the International Harvester McCormick Farmall M and pull a grain cart alongside the combine. My job was to unload the oats from the wagon. I would haul the wagon to the home place, drive across a wagon lift, start up the John Deere 730, and engage the power takeoff to start up the elevator that would transport the oats into our grain bin located north of the garage. You can see a posted article from 45 years ago that was on the front page of the Yankton Press and Dakotan. My oldest brother said we had a good oats crop that year – 60 bushels to the acre. The other photo shows my mom and two of my older brothers harvesting the wheat crop that we planted each year.
Our farm was self-sustaining. My mom did a lot of baking and there were no preservatives in our food whatsoever. We grew almost everything that we ate including planting around 1.5 to 2 acres of wheat each year. The harvested wheat was then stored in cream cans to protect it from being eaten by mice. Throughout the year, my siblings and I would sit around the kitchen table to separate the wheat from the chaff. My mom would then take the wheat that was cleaned and put it into her stone wheat grinder that would crush it into flour. She would use this wheat mainly to make anywhere from 20 to 40 loaves of bread in a given setting. Being that the flour was course, she would mix some of the white All-Purpose flour from a 25-pound Robin Hood bag that she bought from the grocery store to allow the bread to rise after she kneaded the dough. I recall as a child seeing the dough rise over the edges of the metal bowls that she had sitting on our freezer in the utility room or on the kitchen table. After she had baked the bread, she would take a dab of Crisco and smear it over the top of the bread to give it a nice sheen once it came out of the oven. The best time to eat the bread was when it was fresh out of the oven after it had cooled a bit. Much of the homemade bread was stored in our chest and upright freezers and would be consumed by all of us kids when we would get home from school right before chore time. My dad would always say, “Bread first,” before we could help ourselves to a cookie or piece of cake.
Today, I purchase a loaf of 15-grain bread from our local grocery store and it’s about $6.00 per loaf. I can’t stand the soft squishy white bread. The 15-grain or whole wheat bread reminds me of the bread I grew up eating. Albeit, I have even noticed how the loaves of bread have shrunk in size over the years with fewer slices in each bag.
I sure miss those days of eating fresh bread from our farm. Every one of us kids had to do their part in contributing to the making of our daily bread. It was a hard life, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. I think of the many times my parents struggled to make ends meet raising ten children. Growing their own food was how they were able to put food on the table to feed a large family. Know that if elected your state senator, I will do everything that I can to be fiscally responsible and be a good steward of the taxpayer’s money, much like how my parents were responsible for being good stewards of the many blessings they had received from Above. Enjoy the wheat harvest. God bless.
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