By Jennifer Elwell, Marketing and Agricultural Communications

This article was originally published in The Farmers Pride.

LEXINGTON, Ky. — Several of Kentucky’s most influential grain crop leaders know the story of the “trip” to England that transformed wheat production. 

Wayne Hunt, farmer and business owner in Hopkinsville, experienced it. 

“Back then, we thought we were really good in this country, and then we went over and found out we weren’t nearly as good as we thought we were,” said Hunt, who joined the English wheat tour organized by Billy Joe Miles 40 years ago. “It put us in the wheat business.”

Billy Joe Miles organizes a trip to England

Miles, the late agricultural enterprise giant and farmer from Owensboro, Kentucky, was a distributor for Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in England. While visiting the area in July 1985 — a trip offered as a sales award — Miles noticed the local wheat crop was significantly better than what was being grown in Western Kentucky. 

In a Wall Street Journal article on the account, Miles was quoted as saying, “As soon as I saw that first field of wheat, I knew we had to do something at home. It was real dark green, much thicker than ours, real heavy head. I realized they had answers we didn’t have. These are the best farmers in the world, in my opinion.”

Miles prompted ICI to help him learn from British methods, which were achieving yields two to three times those in the U.S. He wanted to know ways to prevent wheat stalks from drooping and how to combat diseases such as rust and head scab. 

Within weeks, Miles had convinced his cohorts — 23 Kentucky farmers, wheat experts and agribusiness professionals — to invest in airplane tickets and fly over, where they toured research facilities and local farms, including a demonstration farm run by British agricultural magazine, Farmers Weekly.

According to Hunt, the English farmers they visited put more effort into growing their wheat and were using more advanced tools at that time. 

“I got in one of their combines, and behind the seat was a whole wall of computers,” Hunt said, remembering his experience. “We got all that today, but it's amazing how far behind we were back then.”

Of the experience, Hunt said it was one of the best learning trips he had ever been on. “It had such an impact,” he said. “Billy Joe came back and put the information to use — a program that’s still out there — and we got it all off of that trip.” 

Implementing change back home

Also on that trip was a young University of Kentucky wheat breeder, David Van Sanford. He had been hired in 1981 to develop soft red winter wheat varieties for the region. This was following the groundbreaking no-till research that had been established at UK in the late 1960s. 

By the 1970s, agronomists Charles Tutt and James Herbek stationed at the UK Research and Education Center (UKREC) at Princeton had turned their attention to planting double-crop soybeans behind wheat. 

Once Miles’ group returned and understood the potential for intensively managed wheat, UK research followed suit. Herbek and Princeton-based soil scientist Lloyd Murdock, turned their attention to intensive and no-till wheat production. 

Van Sanford, who is still breeding Kentucky wheat varieties, noted that several factors came together in the 1980s, setting Kentucky on a path to successful and profitable wheat production.  

In addition to introducing new knowledge, Miles brought British agronomy experts to Kentucky, including Chris Bowley and Phil Needham, who continue to work with local farmers today.

“Suddenly, it seemed there was a critical mass of growers, researchers and consultants who wanted to put Kentucky on the map as a premier location for the production of high-quality soft red winter wheat,” Van Sanford said.

Encouraged by the passionate farm leaders who participated in the England wheat tour, the multi-disciplinary Wheat Science Group was formed in the early 1990s at UK. Soils, genetics, pests and plant growth experts united to significantly raise the average wheat yields and no-till wheat acres in the Commonwealth. 

Field days and workshops were held regularly to share the latest wheat production research and management information. Those events are still held today, thanks to support from the Kentucky Small Grain Growers Association (KySGGA).

“By bringing together farmers, researchers and industry partners, we’ve been able to improve yields, enhance crop quality and expand opportunities for Kentucky growers,” said Laura Knoth, executive director of KySGGA. “We want to continue to help wheat farmers adapt to changes in the industry, with a focus on research, education and market development.”

Siemer Milling: Kentucky wheat’s next game-changer

As wheat production and quality improved in Western Kentucky, local markets began to develop. 

“The real game-changer for Kentucky wheat was Siemer Milling Company opening a mill in Hopkinsville,” Van Sanford said. 

Siemer Milling, based in Teutopolis, Illinois, built the Kentucky facility in 1995. According to Brian Semple, vice president of grain supply for Siemer, the Hopkinsville mill produces approximately two million pounds of flour daily. Local farmers sell 12 to 13 million bushels of soft red winter wheat to the mill annually. 

“We try to source from within a hundred to 120 miles of our mill,” Semple said. “After it’s milled, we make our flour to order, and it can go locally or all the way down to Georgia or Louisiana.”

Semple said what makes Kentucky wheat special is the growers.

“The progressiveness of the growers and their willingness to live up to certain challenges that are proposed every year, whether it be environmental or market, helps produce a high-quality plant, which produces a high-quality wheat flour,” Semple said. 

Revisiting English wheat fields

Sam Halcomb, of Walnut Grove Farms in Adairville, thinks about that trip to England regularly as he passes by the 1985 group photo on his farm shop wall. His late father, Don, was on that trip and helped lead the charge to better wheat in Kentucky upon his return. 

Halcomb said that his dad had often encouraged him and his brother, John, to revisit the same place that turned Kentucky wheat — pardon the pun — on its heads. Of particular interest to Don was Rothamsted, a non-profit agricultural research facility that was founded in 1843. 

“My dad thought that there could be some good lessons learned from Rothamsted that would be applicable to Princeton in terms of becoming a world-renowned agronomic research facility,” Halcomb said, referring to the Princeton-based Grain and Forage Center of Excellence (GFCE). 

Halcomb and several farmers, with the assistance of UK agronomy specialist and GFCE director Chad Lee, recently visited Rothamsted and the same area in East Anglia, England, that Miles, Hunt, and his father visited in 1985.

“It turned out to be a very fortuitous visit,” Sam Halcomb said. “They’ve been producing wheat in the area for centuries, and it was cool to see the harvest. While they usually harvest in late August or September, they were ahead of schedule this year because they had a hot and dry summer.”

Lee said that several farms they visited reported it was the earliest they had ever harvested.

“They expect to grow wheat for 11 months compared to our nine,” Lee said. “But what we saw was phenomenal. The wheat is much shorter than our wheat, and the heads are much larger. While there, we saw a yield of 120 to 130 bushels, and farmers were disappointed because the dry weather had slowed down their yield potential. They would much rather see 150 to 160 bushels per acre.”

According to the National Agricultural Statistics Service, the average wheat yield in Kentucky in 1985 was under 40 bushels per acre. In three of the last five years, the average wheat yield has been 80 bushels per acre or more.

While a few, yield-pursuing Kentucky producers can achieve more than 120 bushels per acre in a good year, Lee said the historical British weather and its global position allow for a longer grain fill period.

“I mean, clearly, in the last 40 years, we've not developed wheat that can grow for 11 months in Kentucky,” said Lee. “And because of our climate and where we are with the latitude and the sunlight, I don't know that we ever can. That would be a massive breakthrough in plant physiology if we could ever figure out how to stretch out the seed filling period. For our region, a lot of that gets determined by those factors, so maybe the big takeaway of all of it is that we've come a long way in those 40 years.” 

Lee said he believes Kentucky farmers have a good understanding of how to intensively manage wheat and produce high-quality wheat in the current environment. While Kentucky has adopted a crop rotation system based on many years of research, he said there could still be more to learn from our trans-Atlantic neighbors. 

“I would love to see some sort of larger farmer exchange where we visit some of the same farms in England and retrace more of the steps of what they did 40 years ago and then have some of those fellas come visit us,” Lee said. “I still think there are many things both groups of farmers can learn from each other.”