On the parched plains of the infamous 100th meridian, rain is a blessing ... but not this much rain, not all at once. It has turned the commodity market into a roller coaster. Lutter is philosophical. “Every day is a record day for corn prices. Today is the first day in history that you can lock in a contract at six dollars a bushel.” So why aren’t all the farmers standing around kicking dirt in Lutter’s front yard jumping up and down with joy? “Because the price of oil rose over $10 a barrel today, to $138.”
Despite the risks, the high price of corn has everyone around Jim Lutter plowing up native pasture, canceling longterm Conservation Reserve contracts, and planting corn “wall to wall.” Not Lutter. Over the last two years he has converted 400 acres of cornfield to grass. Yes, grass. Intermediate wheatgrass, a Russian cousin of western wheat—not the hybridized wheat grown as a food crop, but rather the dominant native grass forage of the ancient buffalo herds. “I’m going to sell the seed, and then bale the hay and feed it to the buffalo.” Lutter figures he’ll make less than half as much an acre as his neighbors who planted corn and wheat, but he uses his cell-phone calculator to start adding up his neighbors’ “input costs.” He estimates it will cost them more than $400 an acre just to plant corn, harvest it, and get it to the grain elevator in October. That’s up from $125 an acre just five years ago.
Lutter may be making less gross profit, but he doesn’t need to plant every year. The grass is a perennial. He doesn’t need to fertilize. And he doesn’t have to pay big diesel bills to transport his hay one mile down the road to the small feedlot he operates next to Crow Creek. Intermediate wheatgrass is drought resistant, which, looking out the window, seems beside the point. But drought hovers around the edge of Plains farming every year, like a ghost. Lutter says, “If this turns out like last year, I think we may have seen the last of the rain.”
It’s not easy trying to diversify and unhook from the industrial-farm economy. In addition to making part of his income as a spray pilot, Lutter offers pheasant hunts in the fall at $300 a day. He usually grows corn and soybeans in rotation. He feeds his grass to buffalo that he “finishes” in his feedlot. And he grazes one of the only genetically pure herds of buffalo in the country on sprawling pastures of native western wheat, buffalo grass, and green needle. Jim Lutter is, by modern standards, exactly the kind of farmer John Wesley Powell had in mind when he warned the nation over a century ago that the Great Plains could not sustain the small family farms of the East, and demanded a new model of farming more attuned to the extreme conditions of the West.
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