The Summer of My Wheat Obsession

Reader Contribution by Cam Mather

I’m obsessed with wheat. And combine harvesters. I feel like a 7-year-old that just got a brand new John Deere Tonka Combine Harvester toy and now I can’t put it down. You remember – being so excited about a new toy that you took it from the sandbox to the dinner table to the bathtub. Well, I don’t actually have a new toy but I just can’t stop thinking about combine harvesters. I’ve been a little obsessed about “wheat” this summer since I grew a patch of it and have been busy harvesting it and processing it. I’ve had a personal epiphany about what goes into a loaf of bread and I’m kind of terrified. And it’s all related to the Maconda oil well spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Knowing that we are drilling for oil a mile and half below the surface of the water and then down another 3 miles below the ocean floor has pretty much convinced me that we’ve hit peak oil. What sense would it make otherwise? If there was easier oil to drill for, oil companies would be doing it. Meanwhile China is adding 9 million cars a year to their roads, and as they ramp up to 13 million more cars a year by 2015, we don’t have any extra oil for these vehicles. So oil is going to get really expensive. Which means that things like food, that depend on it are going to get really expensive too.

Growing my own grain has convinced me that a loaf of bread costing $2 is a miracle. When you realize the amount of energy that went into it, it’s astounding. It’s not just the natural gas based fertilizer or the diesel to plant it, it’s that combine harvester. That machine is a factory on wheels in a grain field. It cuts the grain, threshes it to remove the grain from the heads, takes the husk off, dries it if necessary, then separates the wheat grains from all the chaff which it blasts out the back. The grain is stored in the harvester until it is dumped into a big trailer later. Sometimes a farmer will pull the trailer beside the combine so it can unload the grain while it’s doing everything else.

Ever turned on the air conditioner in your car and notice the lights dim as energy is drawn from the motor to run that additional load? I can’t get over how many different activities a combine is doing simultaneously. And they can cost $500,000! In the movie “Into the Wild” the lead character spends some time driving a combine for a company that owns a number of combines and they travel across the southern U.S. harvesting grain. The volume of food these machines and farmers produce is wondrous.

In 2007 as the wheels went off the global economy and the price of oil skyrocketed to $147/barrel, the price of grain went through the roof too. This summer a brutal heat wave has caused Russian to curtail exports to keep production for domestic consumption. Other wheat exporting countries have had similar droughts, while the bread basket of Pakistan has been hit by record rain and floods. Canada’s bread basket had brutal rain this spring during planting season which will see yields way down.

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