I was in Colby a couple of days ago as the U.S. Custom Harvesters kicked off the 2013 wheat harvest season with their annual safety seminar. This time last year, several of the crews were already headed into Texas to cut an unseasonably early wheat crop that continued to run ahead of schedule right through a Kansas harvest that was complete before Father’s Day. This year, the crop is as late as last year was early, with yet another freeze in the forecast tonight. But the…

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The percentage of the Kansas wheat crop adversely impacted by freeze damage is expected to go up substantially in the days ahead. It will take several days after the weather warms up to get a handle on just how much damage was done when the temperature hit a record 25 degrees in Wichita  in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, but there is no doubt that the wheat crop is far enough along in south central Kansas that damage is inevitable. Just about all of Kansas was hit with…

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I have been remiss in my duty to follow every emerging, whack-o diet craze. Somehow, gluten-free mushroomed when I wasn’t looking. Oh, I admit, I heard it mentioned a few times and I even spared a moment or two of pity for those poor souls whose bodies can’t tolerate one of one the world’s commonest food ingredients, the gluten in wheat, rye, barley and other grains. But it has been only in the last couple of weeks that I realized how many “gluten-free&rdquo…

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It was several months ago that I first discovered that Galen, my partner Dave's little grandson, has a love of big machines -- tractors, backhoes, graders -- you name it and he thinks it's pretty cool. He lives in Lawrence and recently came to visit. Since it's wheat harvest time, letting him experience a ride in the combine to cut some wheat seemed like a good idea, Sedgwick County farmer Mick Rausch was finishing up the last of his harvest at a field near his home in Garden Plain; a field…

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Most of you already know I'm a pretty enthusiastic grandma who tries to introduce her urban grandkids to life on the farm every chance I get. Never is that more true than during wheat harvest when a chance for a day of "grandma adventure" is becoming legendary in the family. A couple of weeks ago, I got a chance to introduce grandson, Lewis, to a day of meeting farmers and climbing on combines as we got ready for harvest. This weekend, it was time to take his cousins out for a similar…

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As a general rule, nobody is happy with a wheat harvest rain delay. The record-early harvest of 2012 is an exception. When widespread thunderstorms moved across the state on Wednesday and Thursday and high temperatures dropped from the mid-90s to the low 70s, farmers missed by the accompanying hail just breathed a sigh of relief and took a deep breath of fresh air. And those hit by hail ranging from nickel to tennis ball size checked the damage, called the insurance adjuster and drove…

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Driving from the sprawling wheat fields of west-central and western Kansas home into Wichita gave me a unique sense of just how much, little by little, the city is nibbling away at the wide open spaces of Sedgwick County. I can clearly remember when I first moved to Wichita in 1990 how quickly I left the city behind when I headed out 21st Street toward Cheney Reservoir. Maize Road was the edge of the country; 119th and 135th Streets were gravel roads. Today, Wichita's sprawl is evident as…

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Lawrence Weber is pretty confident that he has good wheat this year. "I'm 76 years old and I think this may just be the best wheat I've ever raised," the Sedgwick County farmer said as he took a break to dump a load of wheat from the combine into a waiting grain cart. "This field is kind of slow cutting because it lodged a little and I'm having to go pretty low to pick up the heads." Weber said his wife has been too busy keeping up with the harvest in a pair of farm trucks to compile the…

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Sedgwick County farm wife Virginia Smarsh says she has been amazed at how early the wheat crop on the farm she works with her husband, Alan, is ready for harvest. "My dad died this month, He was 95 and he told me the earliest he ever remembered cutting wheat was June 6," she said. "But its ready and it's looking good -- probably the best we have had in at least a couple of years." That's in spite of the fact that they didn't apply fungicide to combat this year's heavy infestation of rust…

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Dale and Dawn Hartman were elated to finish wheat harvest early Monday afternoon -- plenty of time, they thought, to get the boat ready and head to the lake for the end of the Memorial Day holiday. But it didn't quite work out that way. "We had repaired a fuel leak earlier today," she said, standing in the still smoking ashes of what had been straw and stubble just hours earlier. We had just finished cutting and we were cleaning up. Dale was blowing dirt off the combine and something…

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