During the two-week-long wheat harvest on the Vulgamore Family Farm near Scott City, Kansas, work starts at six thirty, and the combines run from nine a.m. to eleven p.m. Everyone pitches in, including twelve-year-old Parker Vulgamore, fifth generation in the family to be farming this region. The small town sits nearly atop of the 100th meridian, the line of longitude made famous in 1878 by explorer John wesley Powell, who deemed it the dividing line between the wet eastern united States, where agriculture could thrive, and the dry west where it would not. Pioneers and politicians ignored him, and plowed up the virgin prairie to create a wheat powerhouse that produces most of the hard red winter wheat the country’s mills use for flour. “It’s our dry climate with humid mornings that makes our area perfectly suited for hard red winter wheat,” says farmer Brian Vulgamore, who plants dryland wheat using no-till to preserve soil moisture and prevent erosion during drought years, which can be extreme. The 2022 growing season was the driest since 1895 with only 8 inches of precipitation, similar to some deserts. Many farmers in western Kansas are learning to grow crops with less water from the underlying ogallala Aquifer, which has shrunk by two-thirds in the region since widespread irrigation began in the 1930s.
