WALLOWA COUNTY — A hot, dry summer seems to have come to an end with a few days of rain that grain farmers didn’t necessarily need as they got going on harvest.

“With most harvests you have a little rain,” Kevin Melville of Cornerstone Farms said.

Cornerstone, which Melville operates with his father, Tim, his brother, Kurt, and their wives, is one of the largest small-grains producers in Wallowa County, growing wheat but also sizable crops of hay, peas, canola and mustard.

Possibly the worst of what was harvested was the Melvilles’ dryland wheat. The Melville brothers were hard at it harvesting dark northern spring (DNS) wheat north of Enterprise on Wednesday, Aug. 18, but they were disappointed in what the unirrigated fields were yielding.

Kevin said they were getting about six bushels per acre there when they normally get 60-70 bushels.

“It’s a good thing we have insurance,” he said.

Cornerstone’s fall-planted irrigated wheat isn’t doing nearly as bad, Melville said.

“With the irrigated, everything we’ve cut so far is slightly below normal,” he said, adding the yield has been about 120 bushels per acre, when it should be around 130.

“Fall wheat is within the margin of error,” he said. “Everything’s about 10 bushels lower than average on the irrigated side.”

Not worth it

Many of the crops are hardly worth the trouble.

Melville said they didn’t even bother with their peas and timothy grass hay.

Rather than wasting the fuel to attempt to harvest a crop not worth the effort, “We just walked away from those,” he said. “We never harvested the timothy hay.”

Unfortunately, they didn’t have crop insurance on the peas or timothy grass.

Jim Dunham, who raises feed barley off Dunham Road north of Enterprise, agreed the drought was a killer. He was in a holding pattern in mid-August, waiting for the rain to dry out. His prospects for harvest were not looking good.

“There just isn’t any because of the drought. I’ll run the combine through, but that’s about it,” Dunham said. “It’s a very poor crop.”

In fact, he said, in the 60-plus years he’s been farming there, it’s about as bad as it’s ever been.

“This is as poor a crop as I’ve ever seen,” he said, agreeing that it must get better in the future. “I hope it don’t get worse.”

Dunham said he usually rotates his barley crop with hay to feed the 350-400 cattle that provide the mainstay of his income.

He said he too is hoping federal crop insurance will bail him out this year.

“I hope to get enough back to what I’ve got into the crop,” he said.

He compared his dryland barley to what the Melvilles are getting in their dryland DNS.

“It’s about the same comparison to the barley I raise,“ Dunham said.

For barley, that usually means about 2 tons an acre. This year, he’s hoping to get half a ton per acre.

“It’s hardly enough to even combine,” he said. “If we get more than that, I’ll be tickled to death.”

Drought’s the killer

The drought and the accompanying hot wind that further dried up the crops never allowed them to grow, Dunham said.

Dan Butterfield, who farms with his sons, Robert and Eric, and their wives, raises about 600 acres of DNS near Joseph. He agreed the heat was a killer this year.

“This heat was relentless,” Butterfield said. “It was pretty hard on it. (Wheat) just doesn’t grow as well under that intense heat. Alfalfa does well in heat, but wheat and grass don’t do well.”

He said that although DNS is fairly drought resistant and a “protein wheat,” it still didn’t yield as large a harvest as he had hoped. He said he cut one dryland field on the moraine he estimated as a yield of 35 bushels per acre. He said Portland prices are more than $10 a bushel, but it costs about $1 a bushel to get it there by truck.

Being a protein wheat, DNS tends to make more protein in drought years, Butterfield said. He said the goal is 14%. The market pays a premium if the producer’s crop is higher than 14% and docks the crop if it’s under 14%.

“It all depends on what happens in the wheat world,” he said.

It all comes down to the water farmers were able to get for their crops. Butterfield noted that’s been a problem this year.

“We ran out of water to irrigate with, so that’s another issue,” he said. “We’ve been short of water all year. Now we’re literally almost out of water. It was so cold this spring, the snow didn’t melt and then when it did melt, it melted really fast.”

Melville agreed the drought hurt them.

“We were short on irrigation water,” he said. “We wished we’d had more.”

Looking ahead

But farmers don’t wallow in their misfortune of one year and are eager to move on.

“I hope next year’s a lot better,” Melville said. “Most people you talk to, they’re glad this year’s about done.”

Dunham, with his six decades of experience, agreed.

“You keep plugging along and take it as it comes,” he said. “You have to look to the future and can’t look back.”