Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Wheat farming on the Camus Prairie

I didn't want to hi-jack Wabbie's farm report thread but I thought Sam, Jim, Wabbie, and the other poor mouth ( ) farmers might like to see how they do it around here.
I know it's not like the endless flat fields others farm but the land is so fertile and the crop yields are so high the farmers don't seem to mind.
It's also a lot prettier than a mid western corn field.

Big plant for tiny paddocks
And in no way is my post meant to be derogatory, that is beautiful country.

Nice!

Take a lots of loaves of bread to pay for that combine and tractor...

Bet there's coyotes there too!

I moved to SE Washington years ago for work; I was amazed when I got to Walla Walla area and saw the small grain planted on such steep hillsides. the guys up there call a tractor with wheels, get this.... a wheel tractor! many 1,000s of acres are cultivated and planted with crawlers, and the "self-levelling" combines are pretty cool.

SInce barge shipping is available on the Snake and Columbia rivers, it makes soft winter wheat readiy marketable to the Japs and Chinese.

Have raked hay on hill sides where you had to ride the uphill brake,
if you left up, the front end of t he tractor slid down hill.

Have seen wagons wrap the baler around the tractor making too tight
downhill turns. Smaller tractors get rolled, big ones hold and only the baler gets destroyed.
One can spend a lot of money in 10 seconds here.


A hill on our farm destroyed a tractor, manure spreader, and ruined my older brother.

Always interesting to see crops other than corn, soybeans, hay, and oats grown.

Sure was expecting one of these, a CA Moose.

You know it Barry......If you can find a rock pile or some brush to break up your out line there's a pretty good chance of calling a whole family of Coyotes out of one of those canyons. They also hold a lot of good grain fed Whitetail as well as a few Elk in some area's.

As far as the farming goes....it must be profitable because all the farmers I see bitching about the price of wheat or lack of rain at the feed store when I buy dog food are all driving brand new $50,000 pick up's........and good for them...they work hard for it.

PS...they also grow a lot of Barley which is greatly appreciated by brewery's and myself.

I remember hunting pheasant, Huns, and chukar up there. some good waterfowling too, when the still water froze up and the streams were still open. I used to hunt the "eyebrows" (steepest north facing slopes you had to slip around when farming) near Steptoe, WA

Yea......the land in that pic is pretty flat compared to a lot ot the stuff they farm around here.
Just looking at it I'm amazed you don't hear of more equipment roll over's than you do.......like I said..."they work hard for it".

Don't forget that a lot of that land gets cropped only every other year. The fallow year is necessary to build up soil moisture so they can pull off a crop.

When I was in college in Moscow, maybe 75 miles north of there, back in the 60's, most of the tractors you'd see were Cats. They've been modernized considerably since then.

Maybe in Eastern ID or up on the Palouse Prairie but I can count the number of fallow fields I've seen in the 15 years I've lived here on one hand

Have not done that biannual rotation for several years. Everything around here is fence to fence three year rotations. Over all yield average this year was 117. High was 160 bu. to the acre. The machinery now is so wide roll overs are not very common any more. Combines are dueled with an outside width measurement of 21' with 40' headers. Only problem you really have to watch for now, which happened this year is bankout wagons full of grain coming down hills in heavy stubble. The wagons when they are full way around 70,000 lbs and tend to push the quad tracks around and jack knife them on the hillsides. Scares the willies out of the drivers because once it happens you are along for the ride.

That'd get my attention as well!

Maybe in Eastern ID or up on the Palouse Prairie but I can count the number of fallow fields I've seen in the 15 years I've lived here on one hand[/quote]
Same here. Most people were half and half until we got the proper machinery to allow us to continuous crop profitably that was about 20 years ago. The soil has improved and so have yields. My soil has went from 2% organic matter in 1980 to over 6% now and we are in probably the best farming area in Saskatchewan. Canola Durum and Lentils are the big 3 crops here.

That explains the change from when I lived there in the '80's then.

And it's CamAs prairie, thank you....

The old wooden RR trestle's are pretty cool in that area too.
I keep threatening to spend a day checking all of them out but I never seem to get around to it.
Maybe next year....or the next. grin





There's a lot more pix on the interweb if anyone's interested.

Camus....Camas.......either way it's still just a root.

https://franceshunter.wordpress.com...ick-lewis-and-clark-meet-the-camas-root/

Those trestles where used in the filming of the Charles Bronson movie Breakheart pass.