Girard Clark’s coveralls match the hazy blue sky of late summer as he stands in the dusty stubble of a newly-harvested wheat field outside Pullman.

The sky looks much the way it did when Clark’s grandfather homesteaded near Kamiak Butte in 1883 and harvested wheat with a team of horses to pull the combine. These days, Clark’s sons, nephews and grandsons drive red combines on that same land.

Anyone who lives in the Palouse for a while notices the seasonal rhythms of the surrounding fields, but Clark, 81, has intimately experienced the gradual cycles and technological progression during his years on the farm.

Farming gets greener Hawks circle the combine driven by Clark’s son Mark Clark, waiting for mice to scurry from the garbanzo crop to the freshly-exposed hillside.

When all the wheat is harvested, the combines move on to the garbanzo beans. The Clarks plant a three-year rotation of soft white winter wheat, hard red spring wheat and garbanzo beans. Girard Clark says they’ve planted barley, peas and lentils in the past, but started growing garbanzo beans about 15 years ago.

“The garbanzos pay better and they fit into our rotation,” he says.

The wheat the Clarks grow today is not the same as the kind planted a century ago. The Clarks and other Palouse farmers were among the first to grow a revolutionary semi-dwarf wheat variety called Gaines, developed by WSU alumnus Orville A. Vogel at Pullman’s U.S. Department of Agriculture experimental station in 1961. Before then, wheat typically grew taller than four feet and left harvested fields with a high volume of stubble farmers often had to burn.

“We just didn’t have anything that could go through it,” Clark says.

Now the wheat grows about two feet high, so the shorter stubble is easier to work through. Clark says they used to turn and groom the soil seven times to kill weeds and prepare it for planting, but now they only go over it two or three times.

Reduced tilling is good for the atmosphere and for the soil because it causes less erosion. Small ridges that interrupt the gentle contours of the hills are evidence of former fences and the less-careful practices of earlier generations. Plows left small amounts of soil where farmers had to stop for fences.

“Over the years it adds up,” Mark Clark says. “You look at any fencepost out here, you can see the tillage.” He said no-till farming is a big expense, but they do it when they can. The Clarks are committed to environmentally-friendly practices, but some – such as the organic farming trend – are not feasible for grain farming, he says.

The Clarks’ farm met the present-day definition of organic farming until 1948, when they began to use an anhydrous ammonia fertilizer. Of course, it wasn’t called organic farming back then. That’s the way it had to be.

“We try to be good stewards of the land,” Mark Clark says.

Equipment gets bigger Combines rumble across the fields from the beginning of August to the middle of September, give or take a bit depending on the weather.

Mark Clark says the most-noticeable innovation been the size and efficiency of equipment. “In the last 20 years, things have gotten a lot bigger and faster,” he says.

The function of a combine – to cut the plants and separate the grain from the chaff – remains the same, but modern combines are a far cry from those that required horses. Girard Clark isn’t troubled by nostalgia when he recalls selling the family’s last team of horses as soon as his father, Asa Clark, was elected to the state Legislature in 1940.

“I didn’t like getting up every morning, feeding them, doing the same thing at night,” Clark says.

Mark Clark says it would take a third of the harvest just to feed the horses.

While modern combines have tanks to collect the grain until it can be transferred to a truck for hauling, combines in the past needed someone to be the “sack-sewer” and quickly stitch shut bags of grain as they filled. These days, each of the Clarks’ four combines can cut a swath 30 feet wide through the field.

Unlike the first self-propelled combines with unprotected driver’s seats in front, modern combines have air-conditioned cabs with radios and dozens of switches. However, there has yet to be an innovation that fully relieves the monotony of pushing through acre after acre, day after day. Mark Clark says it gets tiresome to sit all day and still be exhausted every night.

And the little luxuries are not guaranteed. He says the temperature in the cab can reach 130 degrees if the air conditioning goes out.

Regardless of the ongoing technological advances, the essence of the combine is simple.

“It’s just a big lawn mower,” Mark Clark says.

He says electronics and computerization are being used more, especially by younger farmers who grew up with the newer technology. “And that’s true of every generation,” he says.

Mark Clark predicts there will be more global positioning system use for site-specific fertilization and other customized treatment. He says the family has one tractor equipped with auto-steer, and he imagines that someday all the machines will be automated.

Mark Clark says that without the technological progress that have been made, more families would need to work the land.

“I would expect a lot of people would still be back on the farm,” he says.

After leaving the farm in his 20s to pursue other interests, Mark Clark has been back for nearly two decades. He says he doesn’t see many young farmers when he goes to conferences.

“Financially, right now it’s not that attractive,” he says. “The price of wheat hasn’t changed much in the last 20 years.” Finding experienced help can be a challenge because fewer children grow up on farms, Mark Clark says. His 14-year-old daughter helped out this summer by doing odd-jobs.

“Hopefully she’ll be helping out during harvest here within the next few years,” he says.

Girard Clark’s grandson Kyle Clark has been working during harvest every year since he was 13. After graduating from WSU this past December, he plans to work in the field of finance instead of the wheat fields. But only for five years or so.

“I’m thinking I’ll probably come back and farm after that,” he says.

Kyle Clark says the family tradition is important, but really, he just enjoys being outside and working for himself.

“You don’t really have to answer to anyone,” he says.

Seasons keep changing The walls in Girard Clark’s office are bordered with photographs of the area, some new and some in grainy black and white. Newspaper clippings, children’s drawings and technical reports recount the many harvests that came before this one.

Girard Clark is comfortable letting his three sons and two nephews call the shots, and he speaks with pride about his grandsons.

“You can put them on the tractor, you can put them on the combine, you can put them on the truck,” he says. “They can do it all.” But beneath that genial deference, he still knows what’s going on. A true farmer, he has no plans to officially retire.

“Those that do don’t last long, so I’m going to hang on as long as I can,” Clark says.