Word: wheated
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During the harvest on the Great Plains, it is not unusual to cut at night. A few days' delay in cutting ready wheat makes little difference to the wheat; it is the weather that can be the problem. Summer storms often send huge hailstones, smashing car windshields, denting tin roofs, flattening wheatfields. They are so common that once a farmer's wheat is ready, he wants it harvested. And tonight is a whole lot better than tomorrow...
...daylight the combines of Jessie Small's command look like green and yellow robots roaming through the wheat. When they start rolling down the length of a 60-acre section, it seems as if they will just keep right on going. Never stopping. Never turning aside. A 24-ft.-wide reel spins languidly in front of each combine, like a big lawnmower in slow motion, nudging the pale stalks of wheat gently into the path of unseen cutting blades...
...conditioner, turbo engine and two-way radio, is a functioning monument to 19th century mechanical ingenuity. It is a jumble of rubber belts propelling multisized wheels that turn gears, pull pulleys and rotate augers. The object of all this clever instrumentation is not only the cutting of wheat, which the combine does admirably by snipping it off a few inches from the ground, but the threshing of wheat. As the great machines inch their way across the field, a cloud of chaff blows back behind them. Only the cleanly hulled grain remains...
These days, few individual farmers can afford to own their own combines. The price is edging up to $50,000. Besides, in wheat country, combines are used for only a few days during harvest. So farmers turn to combine cutters, also jeeringly known as "wheaties," who hire themselves out, along with their families and their combines. Small is a custom cutter, one of several thousand men who begin their summer combine run in mid-May, cutting down in Texas, and then follow the rhythm of the ripening wheat up through Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, the Dakotas and Montana...
...That year a Page vice president sold Amin a Gulfstream after giving him a lift from Uganda to a meeting of Third World leaders in Algiers. Page subsequently sold Amin a Lockheed cargo plane and furnished crews for it. When Amin wanted to buy medical supplies and seed wheat, Page executives rounded them up from U.S. suppliers. Amin gave Wilmorite the contract to build Uganda's new $5 million U.N. mission in Manhattan. Only after Congress began investigating U.S. suppliers selling equipment to Uganda about a year ago did Page break its aircraft service contract with Amin...