Now wheat!

My mom, Cherie Anderson, has done it again!  This time it's on wheat. We don't grow wheat on our farm, but we do buy a lot of it to bed down our cattle. I love looking at it when it's growing and when it's in bales in the field. It's just so beautiful. A friend of mine just had her niece's senior pictures taken in Greece, and in them she's standing in front of ... wheat! Beautiful in any country! Here's what my mom wrote:

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The farmers around here have been harvesting their wheat for about the past week. Wheat is a cereal grain in the grass family. Most of the wheat planted around here is winter wheat and it’s planted about the first week of October. When it comes up, it looks like a field of grass and is a very pretty color of green. When the cold comes, the wheat just sits there and it survives all through the winter weather. In fact, it’s desirable to have snow cover the crop as insulation. In the spring, it begins to grow again and as it ripens in July, it turns a beautiful golden color. You know, “amber waves of grain”.  

Wheat is harvested with a combine. The combine cuts the plants off and separates the kernels of wheat from the chaff. The last photos show what comes out and is put into the truck or wagon. 

Wheat is almost like two crops in one, as the combine can shoot all the stems of the wheat out onto the ground and then the farmer can bale all of that straw up. If he doesn’t have livestock, he can sell all the straw to farmers who do. It is used for nice, soft, clean bedding for the animals. The straw can be baled  into big square bales, small square bales, or big round bales, just like hay is. 

Wheat is a cash crop, not generally raised for animal feed. The farmer can harvest the wheat and sell it that day for the current market price; he can store it and sell it when he wants to; or many farmers sign a contract ahead of time for a certain number of bushels at a certain price. This happens to be a good year to have wheat to sell!