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| young wheat |
It’s harvest time for Eastern Oregon wheat growers. My morning commute is now peppered with huge grain trucks - tandem style - lumbering along Rt 206. We hear them from our house as well, being only a few blocks from the Mid-Columbia Grain elevators in Condon.
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| seeded field |
The trucks exit 206 at seldom-noticed drives heading into expansive fields of golden wheat. Empty pick-up trucks wait patiently while their drivers maneuver massive combines that gobble their way across the fields. It’s exciting. The culmination of months of work, prayer, and hope.
I have been fascinated by the wheat this season. From freshly planted fields, to young, green shafts inching upwards, to maturing stands, to the golden triumphant field just before harvest - watching the stages of wheat production has held my interest. (As an Illini, I am more accustomed to corn.) I have worried (like that was going to help) when rain was scarce during critical growing periods. I fretted when an illegal GMO patch of wheat was found in Eastern Oregon and Japan cancelled its wheat contracts. I cheered as green gave way to gold. Suddenly the rhythms and the times of wheat farming have become my concern as well.
It’s harvest time. The seemingly relaxed pace of farming is now kinetic as farmers focus on “bringing in the sheaves.” It’s a time to give thanks for the Creator G-d who has given humankind everything for living.
Then God said, ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.’ And it was so. Genesis 1:11
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| wheat nearing harvest |
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