If the Palouse is known for anything, it’s the glorious sweeping hills that span multiple counties. As far as the eye can see lie fields and fields of garbanzos and vibrant canola, with spring and winter wheat being the predominant crop. Though our lives on the Palouse today are steeped in the agriculture industry, the first settlers doubted the success of farming in this area. Starting in the late 1860’s and early 70’s, the first ranchers began to arrive in the Palouse. Under the Homestead Act of 1862, they could claim 160 acres of public land once they had lived there for five years. By the late 70’s, the best of the land had already been claimed, but few took advantage of the fertile soil. Ranchers thought the land would be too dry to produce a fruitful crop. The cattle grazed the hillsides where bunchgrass grew at the time, but the ranchers stuck to the bottomlands. However, as the years went by, formal experimentation and classic trial-and-error showed that the Palouse environment was ideal for dry-land wheat farming. The first commercial grain in the area was grown just south of Colfax in 1869, a decade before the wheat growing boom. In 1878, a man named Philip Ritz and several other settlers arrived in what we now call Ritzville. Although their first crop was destroyed by ground squirrels, they were determined not to give up. Their second attempt in 1880 produced a substantial crop! This case and other similar success stories convinced settlers to invest in farming. The farmers’ first step was to remove the sagebrush, which had been overgrazed by the open range cattle that roamed the hillsides. In order to uproot the plants, they would drag railroad timbers with horses. This was followed by plowing and hand seeding the fields, and finally harrowing. Harrowing is used for surface tillage. This gives the soil structure by breaking down large dirt clods, while coarser harrowing covers the seed once it has been sowed. The hills on the Palouse did not make it easy to plow, especially those with up to a 40% grade. A team of six horses could only plow approximately four acres per day. With all the extra horsepower needed to pull around the machinery, the settlers often started building barns before any other permanent structures, even their own homes. The barns on the Palouse were generally larger than other barns in the surrounding area, often twenty feet longer and wider than the average barn. These horses also played a major role when it came time to harvest the crops, along with the twenty men per farm that were needed to complete the job. The horses pushed the unthreshed wheat in a header wagon which was taken to a stationary thresher. The thresher was powered by a steam engine, a technology that was essential to the advancement of agriculture. While the steam engine used for threshing grain was stationary, this technology was used in trains that connected the Palouse farmers with the rest of the world – the key to turning a profit on wheat production. If it were not for the advancements in transportation, the Palouse would have produced more wheat than it could distribute and the wheat growing boom of the 1880’s would hardly have made an impact.

By 1890, Southeastern Washington produced over 90% of Washington’s wheat output and in 1896, Washington yielded six million bushels of wheat! Now the production of spring wheat in Washington is estimated to be 22.3 million bushels, roughly forty-eight bushels per acre in 2021. As you can see, the Palouse is still recognized for its waves of grain, largely thanks to the two universities that were established around the time of the wheat boom: the University of Idaho in 1889 and Washington State University in 1890. Not only do we have excellent conditions for wheat, we also have people excited to share their love of wheat farming with the next generation. Because of this, agriculture will always be a big part of who we are as a community. As the saying goes, if you ate today, thank a farmer.

• KAYTE CASEBOLT