Way back in the day of my father and generations before him, farmers didn’t talk about mental health because most folks were too proud or embarrassed to talk about their struggles. It was viewed as weak. But farmers have the enormously stressful job of “feeding the world,” which comes with…
Myself and the rest of the Washington Association of Wheat Growers leaders have been doing a lot of press lately. One of the questions we get asked over and over is why we don’t increase the price we sell our grain for to deal with the rising cost of inputs,…
According to the calendar, spring has sprung, but as I write this, we are still freezing up here in Douglas County, so our winter wheat hasn’t woken up yet. Even though the crop is still dormant, I’m needing to make decisions that will greatly affect the upcoming growing season. This…
How hard would it be to grow your wheat without applying fertilizer? You’d get a crop, but it probably wouldn’t be a great one, and with the rising cost of inputs, you’d be lucky to break even. Continue trying to raise a crop year after year without using fertilizer, and…
There’s a lot of issues on WAWG’s (the Washington Association of Wheat Growers) agenda right now that need immediate attention—preserving the lower Snake River dams, the disastrous mandatory buffer bill at the state level, keeping conservation efforts voluntary. Those issues are important, obviously, but there’s another issue that I can’t…
Every new year brings changes and challenges, and this year is shaping up to be no different. In December, we learned that Bill Schillinger, director of Washington State University’s (WSU) Lind Dryland Research Station, will be retiring this month. Bill has spent nearly three decades at the station, dedicating his…
Since this is my first time writing as president of the Washington Association of Wheat Growers (WAWG), I thought I’d take a few minutes to introduce myself and my family. I’m the third generation on my family’s Douglas County dryland wheat farm, which was settled in the 1950s by my…
Well, as this is my last president’s column, I want to pause for a minute and thank a number of people and reflect on the past two years. When I became the current Washington Association of Wheat Growers (WAWG) president at our convention in late 2019, COVID-19 was a foreign…
There is something very satisfying about finishing up a field during seeding. On the contrary, there is something very dreadful about rain falling on that just-finished field. It seems 2021 is the year that just keeps on giving. We are wrapping up reseeding all our winter wheat acres as I’m…
