Driving through western Kansas, one can see relics from generations of agriculture.

These implements, innovative in their time, speak to the ever evolving history of the High Plains leading industry.

The Central Plains, where we are now in northwestern Kansas at the Cottonwood Ranch.

The people have been around here for 13,000 years.

First they were hunters and gatherers and primarily hunting big game.

And then they transposed in probably about 600 to 800 A.D. of not only hunting and gathering wild nuts and berries, but also horticulture came in.

The way the archeologists and anthropologists and some historians say that agriculture is dealing with the plow.

Horticulture is hoe hoe agriculture, hand tools and stuff like that.

They were growing such things as corn, beans and squash in their gardens and also sunflowers, what we'd call pig weed today, or amaranth.

The Indians out here were growing corn in the early days of 600 years ago because corn is an American thing.

The Europeans didn't have corn until after Columbus.

It came out of Mexico and they had developed it themselves because early corn, was kind of a grass with little tassels on it, and they kept selecting the seed to get it.

Now the Indians had as many as 20 different varieties of corn.

Not only did they have popcorn, which was probably served with the first Thanksgiving with the Indians by the Pilgrims, but they had other corn that would only grow so big and that'd be like her baby corn that we have in the salad bars and stuff.

They had those.

They had roasting ears and then they had other corn that was on bigger cobs.

They weren't as big, you would shell out and you could store that in the winter.

So the Indians were actually putting out in here corn, beans and squash, and they would put them in the same planting, or the hill with the idea, with the type of beans they had, they would grow up the stock of the corn, and the squash or pumpkins would spread out around it.

The hoes they used on that were buffalo shoulder blades, and then they would have deer antlers that you would tie to the stick.

That was their rakes.

They had it down pretty well.

It depended on the climate and weather on how good the crops did, but they supplemented that with gathering wild nuts and berries and also hunting.

In 1862, the Homestead Act was enacted, but it wasn't until later, much later in the 1870s, late 1870s, that people came out here to Homestead.

They had to live on the land, the 160 acres.

Part of the improvements also is you had to cultivate at least ten acres.

the first year and then follow up.

So farming was almost required to get land.

The Euro-American pioneers came out here.

They did not know what would grow out here as far as their domestic crops that they were used to.

Yeah, they thought probably corn would grow here and beans and maybe some squash or pumpkins, things like that.

So there was a lot of changing and getting adjusted to the semi-arid temperature of the high plains of Kansas.

So the Pratts, for instance, that lived at Cottonwood Ranch.

Abraham and Tom had been sailors.

And John Fenton Pratt had been a bookkeeper.

They had other occupations in England.

But were not farmers, as far as we know at all.

But they did develop into some agriculture because they planted alfalfa as early as the 1890.

Some of the first out here.

I ran across one instance, recorded in a writing by an early pioneer that he came down and saw the Pratts.

Abraham Pratt and his two sons, Tom and Fent, had broken up a patch of sod and were using little wooden mallets which they had made to break up the sod into smaller pieces so it could be easier to plant.

They were breaking up the clods because when you plow there are big clods coming up.

They were breaking up the clods with wooden mallets because they didn't have the agricultural equipment to go through and pulverize that soil the way they wanted it.

So they were doing it by hand.

So it was very labor intensive, but they grew pretty good crops.

The soil was very rich when it started.

You're talking about 10,000 years or more of prairie of grass growing.

And and the residue from that, whether it burned or not, was going back into the soil.

And so it was very, very rich.

And that promoted a lot of agriculture in Kansas because the soil was so rich.

Those first crops were booming crops.

They were absolutely incredible.

People have talked about sod corn.

I'm a little fuzzy on that definition because some of the stuff I read, it seems that sod corn was the first crop of corn you grew after breaking up the soil and making a field out of it.

Another definition is sod corn was actually planted in the sod.

Instead of breaking up the soil, you would go say with an ax and make slices.

I have this problem.

You guys are helping me with an experiment.

Something's unclear about planting this corn.

I thought these kids could do it, maybe enjoy it.

Then I just ran across a reference of planning sod corn and I didn't know if that was planning corn in the sod that was newly broken.

But others suggest that you'd put a slice in the ground, such as a hatchet.

And so we're going to divide up.

We need, we have yardsticks.

We're going to have people measure it.

Depth to sow That's s-o-w, planting, 1 to 1 and a half inches.

We'll, we'll put two seeds in each slot.

But I want at least one row with the ax or the hatchet, another row with this.

So we'll need somebody with the planter.

And the way this works, poke this down.

And if it was wet or if the soil was worked you squeeze it together and then you open it up.

We'll give you who has the planter.

Okay.

There's another pack to put in.

One method that the pioneers used, the Euro-Americans was a planter, the hand planter that we see being used were the corn goes into a kind of a can or a tube and it goes down a tube and into the ground.

So you can see where it took a lot of labor to do this.

Instead of having the corn planter now that will plant 26 rows of corn.

So you can see why planting the crop was.

You wanted to be a success.

It took so much time and actually a lot of people say, okay, we have this modern thing.

in the 1890s, but these guys are doing it faster with their the belt ax and putting a slice and ground and hand planting.

Yeah that was better know.

So this experiment is for them something to do and to answer one of my questions and hopefully they'll ask about it in the future or follow up and say we planted corn here.

How did it do?

So, did we use all the corn?

Let's do another row.

The Homestead Act where it required cultivation of a certain amount of land.

People didn't know what would grow in western Kansas.

So there's a lot of speculation.

They knew corn would, and thought wheat probably would.

So things came in.

They kept trying things.

In fact, you can go through the Kansas Department of Agricultural Biennial reports and you see what crops were grown and what type.

The Kansas Department of Agriculture used to put out a biennial report on agriculture in the States, and they're a very good reference.

And this was the one from 1887 and 1888, So it had Sheridan County in it and they were trying to get agriculture out here.

They had the location.

It was situated in the northwestern portion of the state, the second county south of the Nebraska state line and third county east of the Colorado border.

So you know where it is.

They give a description.

The general surface is a level table land except along the streams where it becomes somewhat broken and bluffy.

Bottomland average one half mile in width and comprised 25% of the total area.

So here they're talking about this bottomland with the soil of come out and formed this.

We're going to have a really good thing going.

As time went on, more corn was grown.

Kansas for a long time, the corn was king.

Corn was very versatile for a livestock food, and they were bringing a lot of livestock in, such as chickens and hogs and fattening cattle in confinement.

Rather than having them be on the range.

And with their work animals, they were feeding corn and oats, so they needed those agricultural substances to or commodities to feed their animals.

And also hopefully they'd have a surplus to sell.

Many sorts of things were tried.

This is just for the county.

Winter wheat.

Rye.

Spring wheat.

Corn.

Barley.

Oats.

Buckwheat.

Irish potatoes.

Sweet potatoes.

Sorghum.

Castor beans.

247 acres of broom corn compared to winter wheat.

372 acres.

Timothy as hay 23 acres.

Millet and Hungarian.

I do not know what Hungarian was or is.

Crops that probably were not recorded or plantings that were probably not recorded because they failed either because of the soil, the environment, such as the lack of rain in certain periods.

So you have a lot of adaptation from people from areas with different environments that did not know what the environmental conditions would be on the on the high plains of Kansas.

Even tobacco was grown out here with a few acres at a time.

If you had the right soil and could keep the bugs out of it.

But it was very labor intensive and tobacco was used a lot of places.

That farmer would dry it and and sell it depending on the year and the price of the grains, things changed.

and they still do today in the 21st century.

You can't really out guess what's going to bring a big price and not.

We spoke with farmer and seed dealer Dan Schultz about crop selection and rotation and the factors that help him make those decisions today.

We you rotations that was milo last year which is a warm season grass We come in and plant corn in it the following spring.

A lot of people plant spring crops Corn and milo as you're aware of in the wheat stubble next spring for the same reason.

Keeping them mixed up a little bit.

Moisture savings is a lot of it.

This field was wheat last year and I elected to put milo in it this spring.

So it's up there and is able to conserve moisture all last summer and fall.

Whatever moisture you got, we've tried to keep it.

I know my limitations up here knowing what my limitations are, I need to plan accordingly.

Our soils have certain make ups that we can't change.

My well capacities is something that I need to understand, realize and respect and use for what it is.

I have two moisture probes out here, one kinda on the east side and one on the west side, that's monitoring soil moisture.

And then I can watch it.

It's like a like a gas gauge.

You need to know what's what's in your tank.

So Milo is a good fit for me up here on the other side there's wheat that's harvested off.

I probably won't put a lot of high water use crops up here because of my limitations that I'm after.

So I think I think moisture probes are extremely important for irrigation nowadays because if not, we're just guessing.

If you can measure it, you can manage it.

So this gives us that that option to do so.

The question of water availability has been a key ingredient throughout the history of growing crops in western Kansas.

The English here at Cottonwood Ranch, John Fenton Pratt in 1903 and 1904, designed and installed an underground watering system in the lawn around the house, which was unusual, but it was a pipeline of of a steel pipe.

He also ran a pipeline from the water cistern, which was by a windmill east of the house to across where Highway 24 is now, because his orchard vineyards and gardens were over there.

But today we're going to talk to Tony Haffner about this concrete water system of a series of segmented concrete pipes that were used in the gardens and he'll tell you about in the 1930s.

This was in my grandmother's garden, and these tiles were buried about a foot deep end-to-end, like they're lying here.

And the overflow from the windmill tank went into the end of it.

And at each one of the joints it leaked and there was an underground irrigation system.

So we think that this might have been maybe a government project.

Right.

I found online some photographs of Mr. Schoenfeld in Sheridan County actually showing holding of one of these tiles, putting a hose water into this into the system.

And it's a FSA, which is a Farm Security Agency in the 1930s, to help people with the what they call the tile garden.

Somebody thought up the idea of water with no pressure on it other than the gravity flow would run down that tube and leak at every joint and that was the way the water was spread underground.

But of course, water management and farming went well beyond the garden.

Irrigation assured the farmers and ranchers that they could water and have feed for their livestock.

And then we found out that gosh, we could do all these other things and grow all these other things that use this resource and technology.

In my younger years out here, people started irrigating.

They had big wells and they had pipes running down furrows or maybe not.

And so they're running water down the furrows.

And then they have what they call the tail water pit were all this water that ran off the field was going into a pit.

The modern irrigation has kind of changed.

So what have they done to change that?

What sort of technology do the use?

So since then, modern center pivots have came in.

Well, it first came in.

A lot of times your nozzles were either at your pipe top of your sprinkler or at your what they call your span rods.

Well, if you're at your top pipe, you're probably 12 or 13 feet above the ground level.

But as we both know, in the high plains, we've got wind, it's hot, it's low humidity that lends itself to a lot of evaporation.

So since then, the technologies have gone to what we call drop hoses, put a a little black rubber hose, three quarter inch hose, and it hangs from the pipe all the way down.

And the nozzle is now down in the canopy of the crop.

Technology has made great advances on efficiencies of how we use the water, the amount of energy that is needed to pump that water.

40 years ago you could do this, but from my house I could bring up and check, pivot pressure if it's running, and if everything good from an iPhone.

So the technology is out there that we can we can hook these sprinklers up with telecommunications to monitor their performance, start and stop them, change speeds.

So first thing in the morning when I get up, I check apps to make sure all the pivots are running, make sure they're running the way they're supposed to.

The last thing I do at night and periodically, you know, you look at them through the day, but it saves a lot of wear and tear on vehicles, burn gas and my time.

Advancements in mechanization and technology impacted agriculture from the beginning.

The early agriculture with the plow was kind of limited.

It was the most fertile soil and mostly in the bottom lands.

That didn't erode too much.

When you were doing horse farming, it's been stated that 30% of your crop production went to feed the animals, whether you were feeding the the draft horses, the work horses to do the the work or your own cattle, your chickens and everything that there was less of a supply.

So the prices were higher at that time.

And the other thing that promoted agriculture a whole lot and more farming and growing grains was the railroad, because you could ship it out.

And when the railroads came through the area, it was a great economic boon to the farmers that they had a ready market because they could ship the agricultural products on trains to the more populated areas.

By the first decade of the 20th century, there were big steam tractors.

They were big and slow, but they could pull a plow that had maybe 10 to 15 plowshares on it, where if you were farming with horses or mules or even oxen, maybe one plow or maybe at the most two big areas were open, big crops were planted.

So after World War Two, a lot of the soldiers or veterans had came back and they had seen the modern life.

So people had been farming with horses and mules even in the early 1940s, decided a tractor was a lot better.

Fuel was relatively cheap.

There wasa lot of good surplus steel created for war times and this could be applied into the farm implements and stuff.

And so things just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

One person with a plow and a draft animal could basically break prairie for an acre A day was about the limit and he got a dollar in the quarter for doing that.

Well, now you have the bigger machinery and you could break an acre in an hour.

Wheat harvest in the early days up until even the 1920s.

And you would go out with a call, a header barge and cut that or even a reaper.

The reaper would come through and cut it with a big sickle, and then it would also the reaper was also a combination of a binder that you would either have to hand tie bundles or after a while you could use sisal twine that would tie those bundles and those would kick them out on the side.

After that, the next process was somebody coming along behind you and picking up these bundles and putting in a shock.

So it could actually dry there.

So you cut the wheat a little bit green and a month later, maybe in August or September, a threshing machine came through and you'd have a threshing machine and you'd go out and take these shocks made of the bundles, throw them in a wagon with the bundle wagon, haul it to the threshing machine because they didn't go through.

You would take a pitchfork and pitch those in.

The threshing machine separated the grain from the stem.

The grain would go into another wagon there.

And whereas the stems and stuff, there was another big blower, big pipe that went another way that would stack the straw up and the people liked the straw.

Now we want little short wheat so that it doesn't blow over in the wind.

But at the turn of the century to the 1920s, it was nice to... People were proud to have a big head on their wheat with all the kernels that it might be chest high and they could put their arms out because the straw was used for bedding all during the winter for the livestock.

So now with a big combine, you harvest it with one machine with the old reapers, they might be eight feet across.

Now, there are combine heads that are 40 feet across to take out the swath, the combine cuts the stem separates the grain from the stem.

The stem goes out the back of the combine, the grain goes into a big bin that's on the combine.

And now there's big grain cards that come in.

You dump the grain in the combine into the grain carts and you don't even have to stop to do it because you can go side by side.

The grain cart can hold five, 600 bushels of grain and go and put it in a grain bin on the farm or dump it into a semi that will hold about 1500 bushels.

And those are taken to the elevator.

So the grain isn't handled as much.

It's a lot quicker, whereas wheat harvest from harvesting it in the summer time of cutting it with the reaper and stuff and then threshing it later after it's dry might be two months and now harvest in western Kansas might take three days because you cut it with the combine.

Big combines, put it in a truck and it's immediately hauled for storage With the harvesting of the crops there had to be storage.

Corn especially was the earliest crop it was harvested by hand.

Then they would put it in open corn cribs, which were slatted structures so that air could get through, whereas a granary was a storage after the corn had been shelled or the wheat had been winnowed or the beards off with the loose grain.

The early day granaries.

They are a building that are on a lot of the farmsteads and there were compartments along the side of the building with a big alleyway that went through the middle of the building.

Those were the threshing floors.

So if you had wheat, you came in with the wheat, you put the bundles of wheat on the ground and you hand flailed it and there was enough breeze to blow through that because you're kind of creating a sort of a wind tunnel to blow the chaff away from the grain that you've harvested.

And so you put the grain on the bins on each side.

From there, they went to the grain elevators, which were primarily wooden frame structures along the railroad.

And so that was kind of a terminal where the train would come through with the grain cars, the boxcars, and they would fill that up and it would go to a bigger terminal for processing, such as flour.

There were times where we can see where trucks were lined up for basically a quarter mile because they hauled things in small trucks, pickups with sideboards, all sorts of things.

And then they developed with the concrete elevators that were see, they get the name because you dump the grain.

Of course, in the bottom, a series of elevators on the inside, or augers, raise that grain to the top and dump it in.

And so you can have varieties of grain in one structure.

So you can have oats and one wheat in another, milo, the grain sorghum in another, corn in another.

Well, that is advanced on too because the elevators made out of concrete are very expensive and hard to build.

So one of the processes now is to use the steel bins, the grain bins that we see in the background, and those are huge round structures.

There's also a storage of having an open ground.

You have kind of a barrier around the base of it, but then then you cover it with plastic agricultural tarpaulins.

There are tubes that go through the grain on the bottom and so that's constantly, air is constantly circulating through that to keep the mold out and keep it dry.

And also it creates a vacuum in the way they're engineered to keep the plastic part tight on top.

Through the generations and innovations from planting corn with an ax to harvesting wheat in a combine as big as a house.

The function and purpose of farming remains the same.

Farming is a lifestyle.

It's a generational lifestyle.

I farm with my dad, my brother in law, my grandpa-father he's 97 years old, going to be 98 in November.

He still comes out on the farm.

Yes, there's that aspect.

But what we do here with farming and everything is we're producing the food that the world consumes.

It's pretty easy to go to your grocery store, get a loaf of bread or whatever, take it home, make a turkey sandwich and whatever.

That loaf of bread came off of a wheat farm somewhere.

They went to a mill, got turned into flour, made into bread.

What we do, whether it's with animal agriculture, main production agriculture, we are growing the food that the world will consume on a daily basis.