Bruce and Janice Frahm's
Northwest Kansas farming page
We farm wheat and corn on our land in the arid, flat High Plains region(3200' above sea level). Bruce's great-grandmother homesteaded a quarter section (160 acres) of Thomas County land in the 1880s, and our family has owned much of this land since my maternal grandfather started working it in 1915. In Harvesting the High Plains : John Kriss and the Business of Wheat Farming, 1920-1950, Wichita State U professor Craig Miner writes about the activities of the farm manager for the entrepreneur/Kansas philanthropist Garveys, and Bruce's grandfather Claude Schnellbacher, Kriss' contemporary, figures often in the narrative. Bruce's brother, sister and our spouses and children now farm in a partnership. Our annual rainfall averages 18", and we have dryland and irrigated crops. It has been customary for 50 years to summer fallow our dryland fields -- we grew one Hard Red Winter wheat crop every two years, leaving the ground fallow the second year to build up moisture. The wheat is planted in September, undergoes the necessary freezing, and is harvested in late June. It is becoming popular recently to rotate wheat/summer crop/fallow in a 3 year rotation, and we adopted this cropping plan in 1998. This method relies more heavily on expensive chemical weed control to conserve sufficient moisture, but has pest control and potential return advantages. Corn is the typical summer crop, but we may rely on milo in drier years. Other farmers are trying sunflowers or beans as an additional rotation crop. Wheat is planted in September and harvested in late June. Our HRW wheats are descended from Turkey Red, brought from the steppes of Russia and the Ukraine in the mid-1800s. While we celebrate this contribution by those emigrants, we wish they'd left behind the Russian thistle seeds they also brought!
We irrigate by pulling water from the Ogallala Aquifer, a huge underground reservoir underlying much of the central USA. Not everywhere is the aquifer thick enough to support agricultural use, but on much of our land it is. It is drawn from depths of 40 meters or more. Our family has grown corn almost exclusively on our irrigated ground. In order to manage more acreage and use the water most efficiently, we use the 1/4 mile long circular pivot irrigation systems, so noticeable from the air, rather than flood type methods. In 2001 we installed a monster 1/2 mile-long circular pivot. Despite our low rainfall and insect and weed problems when irrigating, corn is a worthwhile crop for us. We are positioned west of the "Western Corn Belt", and much demand for corn lies in the cattle feedlots in sw Kansas and Texas. We can truck our corn south and receive favorable pricing for it, compared with selling to local terminals. Corn is planted in April and harvested in October.
The modern farmer must wear many hats -- chemist, marketer, weatherman, engineer, mechanic, tax specialist etc. The economy of scale and diverse expertise our partnership provides is an advantage in competing for survival in this business.
One of those hats is politician. We support the current Freedom to Farm agriculture program, where government payments are not linked to commodity price-supporting measures, and government does not dictate our cropping plans. This is a more nearly market-based program than previous farm bills. It would be ideal if we could move away entirely from government support, but as long as a significant number of countries are closed off from trading with us, and with our national cheap food policies (10% of US disposable income goes to food purchase -- lowest in the world!), most farmers rely on government support to make ends meet. Government subsidization of crop insurance has been a good move. In order to encourage more participation, government should discontinue ad hoc disaster payments. We are strong supporters of free trade among nations; protectionism is old, outmoded and detrimental to natural economic forces. We support use of ethanol as a clean oxygenate and other actions that promote non-food use of agricultural products.
Nephew Lon with Frahm Farmland Inc. has arranged hire of international agriculture exchange students through Ohio State University. They have employed young farmers from the Netherlands and Ireland through this program.
Janice and Bruce in 1997 invested in a "value-added" closed cooperative and hope to become tortilla barons by retaining the profits in processing our own wheat flour. The 21st Century Grain Processing Cooperative transports our excellent milling and baking Kansas hard red winter wheat via rail to Rincon, New Mexico, where we mill it into tortilla flour. Central New Mexico lies in a flour-deficit area, which increases chances for obtaining a good outlet for the product, New MexiKan flour.
If you purchase wheat or corn in western Kansas, please visit our GMI page. You may also want to visit the agriculture links on our home page.