Henry Shandrew's clean wheat in a smutty year, 1915

In October 1915, with smut showing in wheat across Arbon Valley, Power County's new county agent came back from the valley with samples of one man's grain that had none. The farmer was Henry Shandrew, and the American Falls Press printed the agent's account of how he farmed. That same year a single plant picked from a wheat field near Arbon gave rise to a wheat that federal tests found immune to the disease.

The Shandrew ranch lay about four and a half miles south of the Arbon post office. There were two Henry Shandrews, father and son; the Press wrote of "Henry Shandrew Sr" in 1911 and "Mr. and Mrs. Henry Shandrew, Jr." in 1916. The reports retold here give only the plain name, which probably means the father, though they do not say so.

A clean valley in 1914

In early December 1914 Shandrew told the Press that a long dry spell had farmers afraid for the fall-sown wheat, and that unlike some places the Arbon valley was "comparatively free from smut." A week later the paper reported that he thought his Turkey Red good enough to be shown at San Francisco, at the 1915 exposition, against "wheat grown by anybody anywhere," and that he meant to provide some to the director of exhibits, named only as Jones. Whether he did is not known. The exposition's catalogue names J. H. Bullock, whose dry-land wheat had just won first prize at the state seed show, among Idaho's wheat exhibitors; Shandrew's name has not been found there.

A smutty year

Smut, or bunt, is a fungus that turns wheat kernels into black dust; a 1925 Department of Agriculture bulletin calls it "the bunt, or stinking smut." Farmers fought it by treating their seed before planting. In June 1915 the Press noted that smut had become serious in the county for the first time the year before. By harvest an elevator company was advertising that it would take smutty wheat in sacks "at a reasonable discount." Early in October the South Arbon correspondent reported that the Sorenson brothers' threshing machine had had an explosion "caused by smut" (the Stories entry tells of it). George L. Andersen, who once traded horses with Henry Shandrew, later wrote that the grain he harvested in a dry year, which the site dates to 1915, "turned out to be real smutty," and sold for less.

The county agent's report

The county commissioners had hired the agent, a Mr. Kjosness, in September 1915, to set up demonstration plots with farmers, organize them into clubs and visit farms that had problems. In October he spent several days in "the Arbon country," and on October 28 the Press ran his report on its front page under the heading "Successful Arbon Farmer and Methods He Uses."

He called Shandrew "one of the older settlers and a first class farmer," with a farm "as clean as a board" and his summer fallow in ideal condition. Summer fallow meant leaving a field unplanted for a season and keeping it free of weeds, so that the soil stored moisture for the next crop. Shandrew had once farmed very differently, the agent said, until a term at the Utah Agricultural College at Logan "convinced him of the error of his former ways of doing things." He now changed his plowing depth each season to avoid plow soles, the hard layer left when a plow runs at the same depth year after year.

His winter Bluestem wheat had made 36 bushels an acre and his Turkey Red 31, "of perfectly clean, and perfectly colored berries." Some neighbors who had "stubbled-in" their grain, sowing it into the old stubble without plowing, had failures by comparison.

The agent brought home samples and remarked on the "total absence of smut" in the grain, while there was plenty of smut elsewhere in the valley:

Mr. Shandrew always treats his seed grain for smut and in telling of his experiences laughingly referred to one man he knew who was seeding in the dark of the moon to prevent smut, and using smutty grain for seed on land that had produced a smutty crop.

The agent also took up frost, which had killed George Andersen's wheat in a June frost, probably in 1914. Of Shandrew he said:

His crops do not suffer from frosts. I have been told that winter Bluestem was an uncertain crop here. Mr. Shandrew does not find it so, and I am inclined to the opinion that frosts will be a very small factor in either wheat or forage crops when the soil is packed and a good seed bed formed by summer fallow.

The Idaho Republican at Blackfoot reprinted the report. The site's Stories entry on summer fallowing gives George Andersen's eighty acres in 1916 as the earliest dated case in the valley; this report shows Shandrew's summer fallow in ideal condition by October 1915.

A plant from a field near Arbon

In 1925 the Department of Agriculture published Relative Resistance of Wheat to Bunt in the Pacific Coast States, reporting tests in which only two common wheats proved immune from bunt. One was a strain of Martin, or Martin Amber, a tall winter wheat with awnless heads and soft white kernels. The bulletin says it "originated from a plant selected from a field of wheat near Arbon, Idaho, by Carleton R. Ball in 1915." It was "not especially productive or of high quality," but promising for breeding awnless or white-kerneled wheats resistant to bunt. A resistant strain of White Odessa was "developed from a plant selected from a field of Defiance wheat in Bannock Valley, Idaho," the valley's older name, by Ball the same year. The bulletin does not say whose fields these were, and no report of Ball's visit has been found in the Press.

Treating the seed

Seed treatment had dangers of its own. In October 1917 the Press told of an Arbon valley farmer whose valuable horse had died that spring after eating a handful of alfalfa that lay under a canvas wagon cover; formaldehyde-treated seed wheat had been dumped on the cover, and the poison soaked through. The farmer wanted the story printed as a warning.

By 1925 Power County's agent, L. E. Tillotson, was demonstrating a newer seed treatment, copper carbonate. His report for that year noted that one demonstration had been started "in the Arbon Valley this fall on the farm of Wm. Allard," the first in that community. By then the elder Shandrews had left the valley; Anna Shandrew's obituary says the family moved to Avon, Utah, in 1919.