Muddy Roads and Clean Wheat

I should be driving a pickup right now.  It rained, so I’m not.  Weather dictates schedule most of the time in farming world.  My scheduled farmerwife job for the day was to drive 40 miles and pick up my men.  By the way, I’m officially changing my title from farmwife to farmerwife thanks to my daughter (see July 9 post).  Spell check won’t recognize it, but isn’t that how all new words start out?  Anyway - Last night a storm rolled through and left 4 inches in the farm rain gauge.  That makes driving two heavy trucks, one filled with wheat, out of a dirt (mud) farmyard and on country roads more challenging.  Trip postponed - no ride home needed.

tractor not pulling the drill

You might be pondering why the wheat was going somewhere else or you may not care one bit.  Doesn’t matter, I’m telling anyway.  In the fall, a week or two before drilling season, the seed wheat needs cleaned.  Now you’re wondering what we’re drilling for.  Well, it’s not oil (unfortunately) or water.  That’s what planting wheat is called.  No, you cannot actually say "planting".  That brings dirty looks from lifelong wheat farmers.  They will promptly correct you and may consider you a bit of an idiot if they’ve had to explain it before.  Drilling involves pulling an implement called a drill (of all things) behind a tractor.  The drill makes thin ditches, the seed wheat falls into the ditches through tubes connected to a grain box and then is covered up by another part of the drilling implement.  I’ve never fully understood why we can’t call that planting, but I like a happy husband so I don’t ask anymore.  Now he's saying something about planting being more precise than drilling - okay fine.

Back to the business of cleaning wheat.  (Yay!)  There are no detergents or Merry Maids involved.  The wheat has to be cleaned to get out the bad stuff such as shriveled or broken grains, bug bits, evil weed seeds, dirt and other undesirables.  Naturally, this is not done by hand.  Small farmers, well tall farmers too I suppose, especially those on family farms, generally take their wheat to a grain cleaning facility at an elevator (grain elevator – not up & down type – then again…it moves the grain up at times and down at times, I guess that works too, but I digress…again.)  That sentence was entirely too long.  Apologies.  My fact checking husband notes there are traveling grain cleaners – large contraptions on semi trailers - that will clean wheat at your farm.  There.  He’s happy now.

our classic (old) wheat hauling truck

I started out intending to relay the various “jobs” this farmerwife winds up with.  Obviously I lost my way.  We’ll save that for another day.  Lord knows I need more ideas as it’s taken me almost two months to write again.

Happy seed wheat cleaning time!