Showing the Russians

Over the rolling hills west of Montana's Big Horn River, 51 huge combines sliced through the golden wheat fields like avenging tanks last week as they raced to set a one-day world record for wheat harvesting. Watching the spectacle from a vantage point overlooking his 65,000-acre farm stood white-thatched Thomas Donald Campbell, 76, the world's biggest wheat farmer, and two astonished guests. The guests: Dmitry Omelyanenko, 48, Vice Minister of Agriculture of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, and Mikhail Krylov, 28, an agricultural economist, both members of an eleven-man Russian agricultural mission invited by the U.S. State Department to visit American farms.

For two weeks Tom Campbell's combines had harvested an average of five acres an hour for 16 hours daily, feeding an army of scurrying trucks about 50,000 bu. a day. Now they stepped up their pace so briskly that the trucks had to race to keep up with them, by day's end had harvested 61,340 bu. to set the world's record. Hatless in the 90DEG heat, Krylov ignored the official interpreter, barraged Campbell with questions in English. Both Russians tested the chaff spewed from the combines for any wheat kernels that might have been missed, rode the combines, fingered the dirt and the grain, expressed admiration for U.S. conservation methods. When told that Tom Campbell's fields yielded more than 40 bu. an acre from 20 Ibs. of seed, they seemed incredulous; Russian wheat farmers do well to get 32 bu. an acre from nearly 100 Ibs. of seed.

It was not the first time that Tom Campbell had shown the Russians a thing or two about wheat. A pioneer in farm mechanization, he was invited to Moscow by Stalin in 1929 to advise the Russian Grain Trust on growing wheat. When the Russian farm delegation recently asked to see America's best mechanized farm, President Eisenhower, an old friend of Campbell's, asked the Agriculture Department to put them under Tom Campbell's wing. Campbell assured the Russians that they could achieve the same yield by adopting U.S. methods, clinched his argument by revealing that the winter wheat he is growing is actually Russian Kharkov wheat, which he brought back to Montana with him when he returned from Russia.

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