Waiting on rain: Arbon Valley dryland wheat, 1994–2020

In Arbon Valley, southwest of Pocatello, dryland farmers grow their wheat without irrigation, on the rain and snow of the year and on what a season of summer fallow can store in the soil. Between 1994 and 2020 newspapers and farm reports looked in on those growers in good years and bad, and the same question ran through them: would the moisture come when the crop needed it?

A generator for the valley

On January 30, 1994, the Herald Journal of Logan, Utah, printed a short Associated Press item from Malad. Oneida County was planning its own cloud-seeding program. In 1993 it had joined Franklin, Bear Lake and Caribou counties in a contract to seed clouds, but this time the four had failed to reach an agreement. Commissioner Jerry Bush said three generators would be placed the next month in Curlew Valley, Arbon Valley and Juniper, and the county would add three a year until it had a dozen. Cloud seeding, the item explained, does not make storms but increases their moisture. Bush said that the year before, storm clouds had often passed over without the go-ahead to turn the generators on.

The south end of Arbon Valley, around Buist, lies in Oneida County; the rest has been in Power County since 1913. The item did not say where the generator would stand, and no later report has been found saying whether it was ever set up or run.

Good years and bad

In September 2005 the farm radio report Idaho Ag Today found the dryland farmer Hans Hayden just done with harvest south of Pocatello. With all the rain, he said, he had "a wonderful winter wheat crop," his highest yield ever: about 80 bushels an acre on average, with 100 not unusual. The report did not name Arbon Valley, but this is probably the Hans Hayden whom later reports call an Arbon Valley dryland farmer. That farmer is very probably Ben Hayden's son: the Hayden family history says Ben's sons, Hans and Twain, farmed the old Crystal homestead and much more.

The year 2012 was dry. That year the Idaho State Journal wrote about the valley's farmer firefighters in a season of little rain and high winds, and called Hans Hayden a "lifelong Arbon farmer." Then record heat came in late June and early July 2013; Pocatello reached 101 degrees on July 1. The Capital Press, a farm weekly published in Salem, Oregon, found dryland growers across eastern Idaho expecting a second poor grain year in a row.

Ryan Weston, an Arbon Valley dryland farmer, believed the heat and dryness had already taken 90 percent off his potential wheat yields. Healthy wheat was left only in the low pockets; on the hills, he said, there was "nothing that's even worth running a combine through." After 2012 he had moved some ground to safflower, a deep-rooted crop that needs less moisture, and hoped it would save him. Ken Campbell had gone further, with 1,500 acres of safflower and only 100 of spring wheat. In 2012, he said, "Spring wheat was almost a total loss." The full article is reprinted on this site.

Too little, then too much

Three Capital Press reports from 2016 are also reprinted on this site. That spring Hans Hayden applied humic acid to melt the snowdrifts lingering in his fall wheat, to head off snow mold, and found far less winterkill than he had expected (April 2016). By September there had been no rain since early June. Ken Campbell, who normally planted fall wheat in late August or early September, had to wait until the end of the month, when three inches fell in ten days. "It's the first rains we've had since early June," he said (September 2016). The 2016 harvest itself had been large, and that brought its own trouble. Hans Hayden's yields were up 25 to 50 percent, leaving less nitrogen for each kernel, and his hard red winter wheat tested only 8 percent protein. He blended it with good spring grain to just meet milling standards, while Campbell sold about 90 percent of his wheat to feeders (November 2016).

The next year was wet. On April 28, 2017, the Capital Press found Twain Hayden walking a field of short winter wheat dusted with morning snow. It had not yet broken dormancy in the cold spring, and the wet weather had kept him from planting any spring grain beyond a few winter-killed patches. Over the last 30 years, he said, their planting had begun on average on April 19 and finished on May 11. After too many very dry seasons he was glad of the troubles of plenty: "Dryland farmers just have a really hard time complaining about moisture." The key, he believed, would still be avoiding long spells of 100-degree weather in June.

The moisture brought disease. In May the paper reported stripe rust in a weed growing between two irrigated spring wheat fields in the valley (May 2017). By mid-June the University of Idaho's cereals pathologist, Juliet Marshall, had confirmed eyespot, a root rot that weakens the bases of the stems and makes the wheat lodge, or fall over, in fields from Arbon Valley to the Blackfoot area. She expected yields to fall 20 to 40 percent, depending on severity, and said dryland farms could be at risk where limited rotations meant wheat after wheat.

Rain in May

The season of 2020 began badly. Hans Hayden, an Arbon Valley dryland farmer in Power County, told Intermountain Farm and Ranch that his late-planted winter wheat had been beaten up by the winter and snow. It "looked horrible," he said, and he replanted most of it to spring wheat. Hail fell in April and again in early May. Then about five inches of rain fell on his area in May alone, and at the August harvest he was "very satisfied" with both his spring and his winter wheat. Prices stayed weak: hard red winter wheat stood at $4.25 a bushel on August 14.

These reports are snapshots from a few farms, most of them by one reporter, John O'Connell, and they do not give the valley's crop year by year. Together they run from a best-ever winter wheat crop through two poor years, a big crop low in protein and a spring too wet to plant, to a poor-looking crop brought back by May rain.

On this site: the Hayden family; among the Stories, the farmer firefighters and two older dry spells, the drought of 1919 and the drought and debt that emptied Crystal and Buist.