The Empire of Wheat

This week brought a lesson in the difference between a home vegetable garden and the vast enterprise of farming.

This lesson came to mind as a friend and I traveled through the Yakima Valley and across Eastern Washington to Walla Walla. We drove through miles of orchards, past hops, corn and alfalfa fields, past vineyards, cattle and sheep ranges, and then into the Empire of Wheat – mile after mile after mile of wheat.

The vastness of our state’s agricultural industry is breathtaking. Washington is home to about 75 percent of the nation’s hop harvest, and just over 70 percent of the nation’s apples. And our state is home to one-quarter of the nation’s wheat – 2.34 million acres of it.

As we drove through the Yakima Valley, the contrast between irrigated and non-irrigated land was stark: brilliant green bordered by dull brown. Looking out the car window, my companion remarked “Water isn’t just life. Water is wealth.” He’s right. And access to that wealth is determined by a tangle of water laws based on the idea of “first in time, first in right” – that is, whoever filed for water rights first gets the most secure supply. That’s a formula that privileges the earlier settler families over everyone who came later, and anyone who comes in the future.

But as we traveled further east, into the vast empire of wheat, the landscape changed. Wheat is grown without benefit from the vast engineering feats that distribute water from the rivers than transect Eastern Washington. Wheat depends on rain. Wheat farmers have been hammered by drought this year, and for the past two or three years as well. The skimpy wheat stubble we passed was evidence of poor yields in much of the undulating Palouse hills. We were reminded that the bigger the scale of an agricultural enterprise, the higher the risk, especially in a time of climate change.

There are certainly many reasons to criticize these vast agricultural systems: bigger is not always better; there are inequities galore; they are dependent on pesticides and herbicides that sometimes cause harm; they displaced Native people and native plant and animal wildlife, etc., etc.

But there are equally powerful reasons to see this vast growing world and be humbled by it. First and foremost, our lives depend on it. Even those of us with large gardens are not remotely close to food self-sufficiency; we buy the majority of what sustains us at our local grocery store. Many of those bins of fresh fruit, boxes of pasta, and just about every six-pack of beer would be missing if it weren’t for our state’s agricultural industry. And we are not alone; exports of Washington agriculture find their way to many countries whose needs are greater than our own.

When we take a bite of fresh broccoli from our own garden, we savor its freshness and the sense of accomplishment that comes from growing it. We know exactly how much work it took to produce – how much soil preparation, how much weeding, how much watering and protecting from insects and slugs.

Regardless of our opinions about the virtues or vices of big agriculture, we ought to at least accord the people who grow our food the same respect we accord our own little selves. When we bite into a crisp apple we bought at the store, for instance, we have a lot of people to thank for it: the people who planted and managed the orchard, the workers who tended the young trees as they grew, those who picked the apples, and those who packed them for shipment to the store where we bought them.

We are all bound together in ways we should not take for granted.