Wheat harvest links Oregon farmers to mills of Asia

CONDON, Ore. — It’s a limited pallet this time of year in the Columbia Plateau counties. Blue sky above brown fallow, with combines of John Deere green or Case IH red moving in slow, shrinking circuits around golden wheat fields.

It’s an empty landscape, most ways you look. Few buildings and no traffic. And in that emptiness, you can lose track of the broader world. The wheat kernels tumbling into the hopper on Chuck Greenfield’s combine are the reminder of the connection. From Gilliam County, Ore., with fewer than 2,000 people, it will go to flour mills in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines.

“Feed the world,” Greenfield said.

It is a diminished group of farmers who can make a living doing that. Greenfield’s employer, Marc Pryor, said the county had about 150 wheat farmers in the 1970s. Now he estimates the number is in the teens. It’s a classic example of the economy of scale: Like most crops, wheat’s narrow profit margin makes it critical to spread input, equipment and labor costs over more acreage, and it forced farmers to get bigger or get out.

In 1950, Oregon had 34,000 farms of one to 49 acres. Now it’s down to 21,800 in that size category. The state lost 8 percent of its farmers between the 2007 Census of Agriculture to the next one in 2012.

The weather, crop diseases, equipment breakdowns and the market don’t care. Wheat that sold for $7 a bushel one year brings $5 the next. There may or may not be enough rain to germinate and nourish a dryland wheat crop through the summer. “It’s pretty tough right now,” Pryor said.

He’s 66 and trying to maintain the farming operation that flourished under his father, Earl Pryor. His stepmother, Laura Pryor, was the Gilliam County judge for many years. The family business, now called Prycor LLC., farms about 3,500 acres. Marc Pryor monitors the farm from Los Angeles, where he lives and has a business, and returns home to Condon for harvest.

Marc Pryor is president of an engineering forensics business, which involves finding out why materials, products, structures or components fail, or don’t work like they should. Farmers have their own structural problems.

Some are putting land into conservation reserves and making money that way, Pryor said, but that takes land out of production and limits expansion possibilities. Estate taxes can make it difficult to pass farms along to heirs, and in some cases the previous generation still needs to be supported by the farm’s revenue. A strong U.S. dollar can make U.S. wheat more expensive than competitors,’ crucial to Pacific Northwest producers whose wheat is exported.

But to people who question the business, Pryor has a ready answer. “Well, we produced over six million pounds of food this year, what have you done?

“And it’s in our blood,” Pryor added. “That’s why we’re still doing it.”

Chuck Greenfield, the combine driver, turns 72 in September and is the Prycor field manager. He’s worked for the family 35 years.

“You’re kind of independent …,” he said. “If you work in a factory, you’re basically a number.”