Five decades of change for Lamona farmer

The following is reprinted from Ventures, the newsletter of AgVentures NW, LLC. The interview of Tom Wilson, of Lamona, and article were done by Burke Perry of VistaComm, an advertising and marketing company which makes the newsletter.

From cutting wheat 14 feet at a time to doing a day’s worth of harvesting in an hour, Tom Wilson has seen a lot of change in his 54 years of farming.“We’ve always hauled into the elevator at Lamona,” Tom recalls. “I was 13 the first time I hauled a load in and was driving the combine at 14. You could get an agricultural permit to drive a truck at 12 back then if you were helping on the farm. You couldn’t drive to school, although that didn’t always stop us.”

Tom’s grandfather homesteaded in 1906, and he and Tom’s father bought the current farm near Lamona in 1917. In addition to farming, Tom recalls that his father also worked for Odessa Union. Tom was born at 12:02 a.m. on Jan. 1, 1940 – the first baby born in the state that year. His father passed away in 1961, and Tom took over the farm at the age of 21. He notes that just about everything about farming – equipment, fertilizer, yields – is different now.

“My first combine was a John Deere 55 Hillside with a 14-foot header,” he says. “The combine I’ve been running for the past three years can cut more in one hour than my first combine cut in a day. Wheat prices were between $1.30 and $1.50 in those days, and those prices were pretty flat for years.”

The market is a lot more active now, and where he used to check prices with a reader board, Tom now tracks them online.