It's Harvest Time!

For Jack McCaw and Doug Lambert, much has changed in farming over the years, but the excitement of harvest is still there.

By Ken Graham

"For more than 50 years, Walla Walla County farmer, Jack McCaw, has spent his Julys and Augusts harvesting wheat. It's a routine that's been shared by farmers throughout the area since agriculture arrived here 150 years ago. "In the old days we would bite a few kernels to see if they cracked," says Jack. "Now we still do that, but it's just for fun. To determine when the wheat is ripe, we now use a hydrometer to measure the moisture content." When the wheat is dry enough, the combines start rolling.

Although the routine of harvest has remained consistent for farmers over the years, farming technology and practices have changed dramatically. When Jack began working on his family's farm, wheat was loaded into sacks right on the combine. Bulk tanks and off-loading into trucks didn't begin until the 1940s. "We got our first self-propelled combine in the late 1950s," says Jack. "Until then, they were pulled by something else – either horses or crawler-tractors."

Jack's grandfather, RC McCaw, came to the Waitsburg area in 1898. He purchased land between Waitsburg and Prescott and farmed with his son Jay, using a combine pulled by a team of horses. "It took five men to operate the whole setup," says Jack. "Besides the combine driver, there was a header-tender (who raised and lowered the cutting bar), a machine man, a sack loader or ‘jigger', and a sack-sewer." The full sacks of wheat were left in the field to be picked up later and placed in storage or sold.
"In those days there was no fertilizer," says Jack. "Except for the horses, of course." Jack says that since fertilizer was introduced in the late 1940's and new strains of wheat developed in the years since, yields have more than doubled. "In the old days, 25 bushels per acre was considered a good wheat harvest around here," he says. "Now we have fields that will go 80 or more."

Jack started helping in the field during harvest as a teenager in the late 1930s. This was about the time that horses were being replaced by tractors. "Tractors were the new technology," he says, "and lots of farmers resisted." Most farmers kept their horses around because even the most advanced farmers didn't totally trust the new technology.

After graduating from Prescott High School in 1945, Jack entered the Navy and right away was put on an amphibious landing ship in the Pacific. "We were getting ready to invade Japan," he says. "When the atom bombs were dropped, I was in the ocean, headed that way." After Japan surrendered and World War II ended, Jack joined the US occupation force in Japan. He left the Navy and returned home to the farm in late 1946.

When asked if he ever gets nervous and excited as harvest time approaches, McCaw said, "Oh, not any more." "Boy, he used to," says Jack's wife Lauretta. "It was always a tense time." Harvest is the culmination of the entire year's work, and farmers only get that one "pay day". It's a race to get the grain cut and into the elevator before wind, rain, hail or fire beat the combines to it.

With extra help hired for a few weeks – often schoolteachers – the McCaws usually begin harvesting in mid-July. "The women have always worked just as hard as the men," says Lauretta. "Just not always in the field." However, in the past 50 years, many women have joined the men in the field, driving trucks, bank-out wagons and even combines.

Jack and Lauretta's son, Guy, is now in charge of the farming operation. Guy's son, Jesse, and his brother's son, John, farm alongside him. Guy's harvest crew also includes four or five hired hands. They use three combines and bank-out wagons to harvest the McCaw ground plus considerable leased acreage in the area surrounding Waitsburg.

When Doug Lambert started helping his dad, Loren, on the family farm in the late 1940's, the wheat was tall and "beardless". "When I'd walk out into the field, it often came up to here," Doug said, pointing to his upper chest. "If a stiff wind came up a lot of the wheat would shatter and fall to the ground. We had to hustle to get harvest done before any big winds came." In the early 1960s, Doug began planting a bearded "semi-dwarf" variety of wheat. The stalks were shorter, and the "whiskers" helped retain moisture as the wheat grew. They also helped keep the wheat from shattering so easily.

Doug and his wife, Darlene, took over the Lambert farm in 1960. They harvested with one combine and one truck. "I was the ‘hired man'," says Darlene. "I drove beside the combine to load the truck while Doug was cutting. If we were on a steep section, I'd have one foot propped against the door so I could keep myself behind the wheel."

Over the years, the trucks Darlene drove kept getting bigger. In the early days, it took one load from the combine to fill the truck. (Darlene had no idea what kind of truck she drove then, but Doug remembered that she switched off between a '47 Ford and a '56 Chevy) "Later on we had a bigger truck, and we'd put one load toward the back, and then a second toward the front," says Darlene. "The last truck I drove could hold three loads – one in the front, one in the middle and one in the back."
"And the combines were bigger, so the loads were bigger," added Doug.

Today, the Lamberts and many other area farmers use a tractor pulling a large bulk tank trailer to off-load the combines. These bank-out wagons, as they're called, transfer the wheat through an auger to waiting semi-trucks.

Doug's grandfather, Rolla Lambert, came to Columbia County with his mother, brother and sister in 1896. He was seventeen. The family homesteaded ground on Eckler Mountain, near Pioneer Park. They later added more land closer to Dayton, near the "Lone Pine". In 1922, Rolla sold the Eckler Mountain land and purchased land and a four year old house on the Whetstone, north of Dayton, where Doug and Darlene still live.

Rolla farmed exclusively with horse-drawn machines from 1896 to 1933. "It took 16 horses to pull the plows, and a team of 35 horses pulled the combines," says Doug. The first crawler-tractors began arriving in the area in the early 1930s. "My grandfather embraced the new technology pretty quickly. He sold most of his horses in 1933, except for couple of teams to use as a back up." Rolla's son, Loren, took over the farm after Rolla died in 1938.

Doug and Darlene's children, Mark, Dan and Kathy (Arnzen) grew up helping on the farm, especially during harvest. Mark took over the reins completely in 2003, joining his own independent operation to the family farm. His children, Heather and Brett, carry on the tradition of working harvest every summer.
"They can cut more than twice as many acres with the same crew as we could when we started," says Doug. "And our yields were twice what my grandfather produced in the early days. One year he got 35 bushels to the acre, and he was thrilled."

Over one hundred harvests have come and gone on the McCaw and Lambert farms. Jack and Doug are happy to have passed the baton to the next generation. The 2008 harvest will soon be a memory and the cycle will begin all over again.

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