Tribune, KS

The trucks stopped rumbling into the weigh station about 10:15 p.m. Sleep came on quickly after that.

When I awoke the winds were out of the east, the direction I’m headed, at 20-25 m.p.h. The hated headwinds. Given the other two favorable factors, overcast skies and a cool temperature, I decided to plow through to Tribune, 58 miles east. I got here hoping to find a motel room but since harvesting is in full swing the inn is full. I’m camping in the city park but it’s next to the city swimming pool which has free admission this festive day. A lovely, cooling swim. It also has a warm shower. Tonight I will have a prime seat for the city’s fireworks, according to the sheriff’s dispatcher, and if I want I can get free ice cream at the football field at 8 p.m.

This landscape is stunning in its simplicity…it simply stretches to the horizon, a treeless vastness filled with wheat, poor pasture land or corn that’s knee-high. College lectures in Art Appreciation 101 about perspective came to mind as I looked down the straight ribbon of road in front of me. Towner, my next destination at one point, lay 12 miles ahead according to my map. Not only could I see its grain silos but also some of the houses and stores. From 12 miles away!! That’s how flat this land is.

Passing a grain silo in Brandon, I stopped and talked to Mary Jo Tallman who measures the moisture content and weight of the wheat being hauled onto the scales by trucks loaded with between 1,000 and 1,200 bushels. Unlike many of the other storage facilities around here, the Tallmans own their own weighing station and silos. They farm 35,000 acres. They contract the harvesting and store the wheat until the per-bushel price reaches a price they want, if it ever does. 2010 is proving to be a “very, very good year” for wheat. All silos are filled and wheat is now being piled on the ground in mounds the size of two story-high football fields. The mounds are then covered with massive tarps. While I was eating breakfast this morning in a gas station convenience store, one farmer said to another, “All my life we haven’t been able to get the wheat prices up high when we have a lot of it.” He wanted the price up near $6 a bushel. It’s hovering around $3.70. It costs a farmer about 4 cents per month to store a bushel of wheat. “That’s where it gets tricky,” said another farmer. “You hold on too long hoping the price goes up and it doesn’t, you’ve lost any profit just by paying monthly storage costs.”