The semiarid plains of western Kansas and eastern Colorado are
hardly the setting for an agricultural empire, but it was here that
former field hand John Kriss managed G-K Farms for Wichita
entrepreneur Ray Garvey. Their enterprise became one of the largest
wheat operations on the plains and yielded Kriss a one million
bushel crop.
"Harvesting the High Plains" is the rags-to-riches story of how
Kriss applied hard work and common sense to make large-scale
farming work under the most adverse conditions. Drawing on
correspondence between Kriss and Garvey, it tells how the two men
had to make innumerable decisions about the purchase of expensive
machinery and of ever larger tracts of land, and how Kriss kept
detailed records of crops and rainfall to manage the land
carefully, farming thousands of acres in an environmentally
sensitive way and retaining a viable operation even during the Dust
Bowl years.
In chronicling the story of Kriss's success, historian Craig
Miner provides a bold counterpoint to the argument that large,
technology-based farming is inherently bad or that only small
farmers can be conscientious stewards of the land. He sets his
narrative in the context of local and agricultural history-as well
as the Kriss family's own story-in order to document the transition
to mechanized, specialized farming on the plains. He addresses
philosophical and historical questions about the relation between
agriculture and nature in a semiarid region, showing that G-K Farms
managed to strike a remarkable balance between profit and ecology.
He also suggests that G-K may even have done its region more
economic good than small farms simply by staying in business during
bad times.
The Kriss family still works the land, and although their
operation is huge, it still depends on traditional family farming
values and approaches. Harvesting the High Plains provides keen
insights into their special approach to large-scale farming and
gives a human face to the faceless statistics of other agricultural
studies.
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