For most of the twentieth century Arbon Valley and Crystal raised dryland wheat, grown on stored moisture and whatever rain the season brought. In the three decades after 1950 the Idaho State Journal in Pocatello rarely gave the valley's harvest a story of its own. It turns up instead in short crop reports, a few lines in a county roundup, and once, in 1982, in a reporter's visit to the fields. Read together, those glimpses show how weather and markets set the terms of a valley farmer's year.
1951: a harvest that would not end
The winter wheat harvest had begun across the Pocatello, American Falls, Arbon and Rockland country by August 7, 1951, when the state employment office in Pocatello reported that about 20 men had gone out to farm jobs there through its office so far that month. The office figured the winter wheat would keep crews busy for about three weeks more, and nobody had started on the spring wheat yet. Rain in recent days had put the cutting behind and done the winter wheat crop some damage.
By September 19, according to an Associated Press item from American Falls, Arbon Valley was the one corner of Power County still cutting wheat. Growers there had started in the second week of July, and none of them could recall a harvest that ran so long. The size of the crop was still anybody's guess, since more of them than usual were holding the wheat at home in their own granaries instead of hauling it to the American Falls elevators, where it would have been counted. Granaries were part of a valley farm's equipment; they turn up in the farm ads of the same years.
1954: a dry spring
In April 1954 the worry ran the other way. Rain fell over southeastern Idaho on the night of April 27 after nearly a month of drought, and the Journal put it on the front page the next day. Farmers with water were already irrigating, the paper noted, while those raising dry-land grain near Malad, Arbon and American Falls had no such help. In the dryland districts of Malad valley, Power County and the Arbon-Crystal area, the paper said, growers had been afraid their young wheat would burn. The pages read for this post do not say how the 1954 crop turned out.
1957 and 1968: rain at harvest time
Rain at the wrong time could do as much harm as drought. Lena Anken Sexton wrote about the fall rain and snow in a Journal essay in October 1957, and Arbon was one of the places she listed in a passage on late wheat that had yet to see a combine.
August 1968 was worse. Rain had stopped the harvest, and Power County officials and elevator managers were trying to get word to each farmer whose wheat was still in the field, hoping to hold the damage down. Kernels were sprouting in the head, and damp grain put away in commercial or ranch elevators risked heating or weevils. Sprouting and insects together could cost up to $650,000, by the estimate of Alvin Kranzler, who ran the county ASCS office. The county agent, Sterling Schow, very likely the same man who counted the acres sprayed against grasshoppers in the 1970s, told farmers how to test a hundred seeds for sprouting between damp towels kept at room temperature. Countywide, no more than 60 percent of the grain was in, though the American Falls area was close to 85 percent done. Up on the higher farms at Crystal, Arbon and Roy, plenty of growers had hauled just six to eight loads. The paper traced most of the sprouting to soft white wheat grown under sprinklers. It gave no loss figure for the valley.
1982: a good crop at a poor price
By 1982 the trouble was price. In August the Journal's regional editor, Paul Beebe, visited Arbon Valley while John Newport's combine was working through his dryland wheat; Beebe also talked with two cousins, Ron and Allen Searle, whom the paper's photographer, Doug Lindley, showed beside their combines checking the moisture of their wheat. Newport's stand was good, yet all three expected to make little or nothing on the year. Beebe's story is retold below.
The John Newport in the fields was very likely John Lee Newport, the adopted son of Lee and Gena Newport, who by the site's research ran the Newport family ranch until 2002. The article itself twice calls him Newton in the middle of the story, a slip the lead and later paragraphs correct.
Much is missing from these reports. None gives a yield or total for the valley as a whole, and only the 1982 story names any valley farmers. The Searles' contract figures are blotted on the page scan and cannot be read.
On this site: the story continues in Waiting on rain: Arbon Valley dryland wheat, 1994–2020, and Contour strips and hillside combines, 1952–1965 shows how valley farmers worked their slopes in the same years. On dryland farming itself, see summer fallow among the valley's firsts.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, August 22, 1982, page 45. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
Arbon Valley wheat growers were at harvest in August 1982 but expected low prices to leave them little or no profit, Journal regional editor Paul Beebe reported from the valley. Idaho's wheat harvest was running about 10 percent under the previous year's, and farmers expected prices to fall regardless.
John Newport had some 1,000 acres of dryland red wheat to bring in. He put the yield at about 36 bushels an acre from a heavy, well-filled crop in good shape, if a notch below 1981's. A buyer had just paid him $3.77 a bushel for a load of unusually high-protein grain. His verdict on the market: "It's dead." Store or sell was still an open question for him. Prices like that, he told Beebe, would never cover the cost of the combine he had bought late in 1981, not once a farmer did the arithmetic. Two years of money and labor, he expected, would return very little.
Cousins Ron and Allen Searle, two more valley farmers, were no happier about prices. "It hasn't been good, it's been terrible," Ron said. The pair had already locked in a price on a contract for soft white wheat, so that whatever the market did they would have cash for their bills; the bushels and price are blotted on the surviving page. Surplus wheat was everywhere, Ron said. As for parity, he had lost track of it; farming had come down to raising and harvesting the crop and hoping it left a little money.
Steve Burglund, executive director of the Idaho State Wheat Growers Association, put the likely Idaho price at $3.30 to $3.60 a bushel, in line with a U.S. Department of Agriculture forecast that the national average would slip 15 to 20 cents from last year's. Land prices were sliding with grain prices, he said, and with credit tighter, more farmers were going broke under heavy debt. Bankers were uneasy too about loans already on their books, most of them backed by land. Smaller Northwest crops made little difference, he said, when the Midwest's surplus was setting the price for all. The Soviet Union had taken most of the Midwest's grain until President Carter's embargo, and President Reagan's one-year extension of grain sales had not yet brought a single Soviet order.
Burglund pointed to export deals as the hopeful news: Egypt was to buy 80 million more bushels of soft white wheat, close to all that Idaho grew that year, and Japan and Korea had signed on for about 78 million bushels.