In Montana: Rolling North with the "Wheaties"

By Barry Hillenbrand

Jessie Small sits in the front seat of his Chevy pickup truck chomping on an unlit Roi-Tan cigar and directing his three combines as they complete the cutting of a wheatfield about 15 miles outside the town of Circle, Mont. Jessie seldom bothers to light his cigars; mostly he just chews on them, discarding the soggy end, piece by piece, until there's nothing left. The radio linking him with his combines crackles: "Which way do we go? I can't find the new area?"

It is well after sunset. Some blue remains in the darkened Western sky. Jessie can see only the lights of his combines, as one by one they disappear over a hill. "Follow that star," drawls Jessie over the radio. The combines, like tanks on night maneuvers, head west, following Venus, which is low and bright in the sky. "We've got it!" Gary Coleman, driver of the lead combine yells back. He slows his machine, turns and lowers the cutting head into a rich wave of uncut field.

During the harvest on the Great Plains, it is not unusual to cut at night. A few days' delay in cutting ready wheat makes little difference to the wheat; it is the weather that can be the problem. Summer storms often send huge hailstones, smashing car windshields, denting tin roofs, flattening wheatfields. They are so common that once a farmer's wheat is ready, he wants it harvested. And tonight is a whole lot better than tomorrow.

In daylight the combines of Jessie Small's command look like green and yellow robots roaming through the wheat. When they start rolling down the length of a 60-acre section, it seems as if they will just keep right on going. Never stopping. Never turning aside. A 24-ft.-wide reel spins languidly in front of each combine, like a big lawnmower in slow motion, nudging the pale stalks of wheat gently into the path of unseen cutting blades.

From the driver's seat in the air-conditioned cabin, there is no tranquillity about a 19,000-lb., 150-h.p. John Deere 7700 combine, even run at half throttle. The engines hiss and suck. The cutting blades click like a madwoman's knitting needles. In this age, when transistors perform wondrous deeds with assistance from only a few volts of electricity, the combine, despite its air conditioner, turbo engine and two-way radio, is a functioning monument to 19th century mechanical ingenuity. It is a jumble of rubber belts propelling multisized wheels that turn gears, pull pulleys and rotate augers. The object of all this clever instrumentation is not only the cutting of wheat, which the combine does admirably by snipping it off a few inches from the ground, but the threshing of wheat. As the great machines inch their way across the field, a cloud of chaff blows back behind them. Only the cleanly hulled grain remains.

These days, few individual farmers can afford to own their own combines. The price is edging up to $50,000. Besides, in wheat country, combines are used for only a few days during harvest. So farmers turn to combine cutters, also jeeringly known as "wheaties," who hire themselves out, along with their families and their combines. Small is a custom cutter, one of several thousand men who begin their summer combine run in mid-May, cutting down in Texas, and then follow the rhythm of the ripening wheat up through Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, the Dakotas and Montana.

Jessie Small is not much different from other cutters, except that he is one of the best in the business. When he started out cutting in 1951 with a secondhand $4,200 John Deere 55, custom cutting was a rough and raw business. The crews slept on beds of newly cut grain in the back of their trucks, and even when they were not actively brawling in bars tended to be as welcome in farm towns as a band of crazy gypsies. But by the early '60s, cutting had become the respectable family business it is today. Wives and children, following along in trailers, began joining their men on the road.

Today Smalls' Harvesting is run by Jessie (who oversees three combines), his son Joe, 34 (who manages two more), and Jessie's cousin Gayle. Jessie's other son, Byron, 17, and daughter, Susie. 14, both drive combines, though Susie, much to her annoyance, is still considered something of an apprentice. "When I'm 18," she declares, "I'm going to have my own combine and all-woman crew." When Susie says things like that, Byron makes a face as if he's just finished sucking on a lemon. Jessie, proud of his daughter, but more comfortable with the idea that a woman's place is back in the house trailer cooking up corn biscuits, smiles and takes another chomp on his cigar. Meanwhile. Joe's son Allen, 4, scampers around the trailer on his toy John Deere tractor.

The Small children all share the common desire to spend just one summer back home in Missouri. "I don't expect I'd like it much," Byron admits, "but I'd sure like to see what it's like." Many children who inhabit the wheat belt have a secret desire to spend a summer roaming from state to state with the cutters. The Smalls each year employ 14 hired boys (including Byron). The members of the crew live in motel rooms, paid for by the Smalls, eat bountifully of the well-prepared home cooking around the tables in the Smalls' house trailers, and make up to $200 a week. "You know what it would be like to go off and join a carnival?" says one of the boys. "Well, this is better."

In ports of call like Circle, Mont. (pop. 964), or Alliance, Neb. (pop. 7,987), or Vernon, Texas (pop. 11,454), the Smalls' young crewmen dabble only halfheartedly in once cherished cutter traditions: drinking beer, chasing girls and avoiding brawls with jealous local boys who delight in baiting the wheaties. Despite the myths of wild living, the boys mostly work long hours (when it doesn't rain), eat quickly, sleep a lot and save their money, a practice made easier by the fact that the Smalls, like most employers, pay off at the end of the season in one lump sum (minus small advances given along the way).

Though the Smalls have a good deal of capital invested in machinery, they make a comfortable living off their combines, but like the farmers they serve, they worry a lot about the future of American agriculture. "Farming is the only thing holding this country together," says Joe. "When it folds, that's the end of this country, freedom, everything."

Equipment prices have soared. Jessie's $50,000 machines cost only $17,000 in 1971. Next year he plans to trade in three or four of his old combines on several new John Deeres with 30-ft.-wide cutting heads. Price tag: $60,000 each. The Smalls' present inventory of equipment is worth better than half a million dollars: seven combines, six $20,000 trucks for hauling the cut grain to the elevators, three service pickups loaded down with about $20,000 worth of spare parts (the Smalls do all their own repair work), three house trailers, a 1976 pickup and a beat-up four-door blue American Motors station wagon.

Working summers cutting wheat and October through Christmas harvesting soybeans in Mississippi, the family should gross nearly $400,000. But on-the-road expenses gobble up more than a third of that. The bank, which holds mortgages on $100,000 worth of trucks, takes its cut.

Insurance is another $20,000.

"When things are good for the farmer," says Joe, "things are good for us."

U.S. wheat prices rise or fall according to world supply. Last year wheat was plentiful, and the prices sank to $2 a bushel.

Farmers around Circle were discouraged by that, and many of them plowed their wheat under rather than pay to have it harvested. This year there is a big U.S. crop, but also Government supports and the hope of a heavy overseas sale. The price is $3 a bushel, not enough to turn a farmer's thoughts to a new Mercedes, but enough to turn a slight profit.

And weather in Montana, all over the wheat belt in fact, has been miraculously moist. Around Circle, Jessie has been cutting 50-bushel-an-acre wheat. Wheat that good bends the stalks and lies close to the ground looking like the matted coat of a golden-haired dog. Heavy wheat is hard to cut, though. The combine has to move slowly, with its cutting head close to the ground. "Ease it up, Roger. Ease it up," radios Jessie to one of his combine drivers. "You're blowing too much grain out of the back." At only $3 a bushel, farmers can't afford to lose any in the cutting.

--Barry Hillenbrand

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