Generations in the Wheat Field

Three figures walk the edge of a wheat field at sundown: a grandfather, a father and a child, by the heights and the hats. The child is at the left, small enough that the wheat comes up to the shoulders, and keeps pace with the two men.

Winter wheat is a long arrangement. It is sown in the fall, spends the cold months as green shoots, and is cut the following summer, so a farm runs on the patience of people who plan to be there next year. Nothing in the picture names a state, but this is Great Plains country, and much of the hard red winter wheat grown there traces back to a variety called Turkey Red.

Mennonite families who left Russia for Kansas in the 1870s carried its seed with them, and the crop transformed the state's farming. The wheat in this field arrived the way a lot of Americans did, with someone who had crossed an ocean.

The three walk in silhouette along a split-rail fence, dark navy against a low gold sun. Heads of wheat in gold, brick red and cream crowd the foreground and run to the horizon, and clouds with red undersides drift across a navy sky, in a palette of just navy, gold, red and cream.