Friday, March 4, 2022
CapitalPress.com
7
Derek Schafer: Growing wheat seed in Washington
By HEATHER SMITH THOMAS
For the Capital Press
RITZVILLE, Wash. —
This family farm was home-
steaded in 1889 by Derek
Schafer’s great-great-grand-
father, about the time many
Volga German families came
to the area.
Derek and his wife,
Susan, do the farming now,
with some help from their
two children who are cur-
rently both in college. Their
son, Devin, is a sophomore
at the University of Idaho
studying ag business, and
their daughter, Linnea, is a
freshman at Northwest Uni-
versity in Kirkland, Wash.,
with a business major.
“This illustrates the impor-
tance of business in agricul-
ture today,” Derek said.
Farming is no longer as
simple as it used to be, and a
person has to be a good busi-
ness manager to make it work.
“Both our kids realize this,
and I think they are interested
in being part of this farm in
the future. As they get older
we will work on a family suc-
cession plan and accommo-
date them if they want to be
here,” Derek said.
The farm grows wheat, dry
peas and canola.
“This is the heart of dry-
land wheat country, and
over the past 10 years we’ve
also introduced dry peas and
canola as rotation crops with
wheat,” he said, adding that
rotations help keep the ground
fertile.
“The rotations also break
plant disease cycles and we
can clean up weeds that are
hard to get rid of if the land is
just in wheat/fallow rotation,”
he explains. “By alternat-
ing with broad-leaf crops, we
can mix up our weed control
strategies and also get another
Courtesy of Derek Schafer
From left, Derek Schafer with Linnea, Devin and Susan.
break between wheat crops.
This improves the purity of
the seed we grow, by having a
rotation crop in between.”
Derek has been back on
the farm for 24 years and says
switching to no-till and add-
ing crop rotation is one of the
most exciting things they’ve
done. For many decades,
most farmers just grew a sin-
gle crop, which depletes the
soil, especially when plow-
ing and leaving ground fal-
low, with soil exposed. This
tends to kill the soil biology
and microbes that are crucial
to soil health.
“Conservation
farming
and crop rotations are work-
ing, and improving our soils,
and we are seeing the results,”
Derek said.
The farm has been grow-
ing wheat seed for about 20
years.
“We worked with local
seed companies to grow seed
for them because we had
clean fi elds and took extra
care with maintaining purity
— cleaning our machinery
and doing all the things nec-
essary to be able to deliver a
good product,” he said.
Wheat seed is the primary
crop on the farm, though
recently they’ve also grown
some dry pea seed.
“We’ve grown wheat seed
for fi ve diff erent companies.
They contract the seed a year
at a time, one variety at a time.
We may grow diff erent variet-
ies in diff erent fi elds, but for
each contract it’s a specifi c
variety,” he explained.
“The contract requires
fi eld certifi cation, and seed
purity certifi cation. It must
be weed-free so we have to
make sure our fi elds meet all
the standards,” he said.
Being dryland crops, the
drought this past year made
it more challenging. “We
were still able to make a crop,
maybe because of the health
of our soil and the fact we
went into winter with mois-
ture. Most of our wheat is
seeded in the fall as winter
wheat, and the fall of 2020
was moist enough that the
crop went into winter in good
condition and had a great
start, but the summer of 2021
was brutal.”
The farm harvested 70%
of a normal crop.
“With 50% rainfall, we
felt that a 70% crop was very
good, considering every-
thing,” Derek said.
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