The Columbia Plateau Region of Commercial Grain Farming

Abstract

LARGE fields of wheat and great blocks of clean fallow are by far the most conspicuous cultural features in the landscape of the rolling hill country of the Columbia Plateau. Landholdings are large; and here and there at widely separated intervals a ranch house and its buildings, surrounded by Lombardy poplars, break the repeated undulations of bare hills. An occasional village, with its grain warehouse and stacks of sacked wheat, is clustered in a notch in the hills where stream activity has provided a small level space. In this region of rather scanty rainfall small streams follow devious courses through steep-sided valleys of loess, while the larger ones have removed entirely the deep, wind-blown soil and left exposed the underlying basalts. Along these comparatively flat valley floors not only the streams but also the roads and railroads twist and curve from one small village to another. The plateau is a region of commercial grain farming devoted largely to the raising of wheat. The ranches, ranging in size from about a half section (320 acres) to well over three square miles (I920 acres), are operated for the most part by their owners; only about 25 per cent are tenant operated. Although most of the cultivated area consists of slopes, some of which are very steep, machinery tractor drawn in contour fashion is extensively used. The wheat, seeded by drilling in soil that has been fallowed for one or two years, is harvested by a huge combine. Many horses or a caterpillar-type tractor draws the machinery along the side of a hill, heading, threshing, and sacking the dry wheat in the field, leaving the straw standing to be burned in preparation for the next clean fallow. Yields range from about ten to more than thirty bushels an acre.