PRATT – Like clockwork, at noon the combine, grain cart and trucks stop.
It’s lunchtime at the Barker farm – and for countless decades, this has been the wheat harvest ritual. Like a family, the crew gathers for a three-course meal in Ruth Ann Barker’s air-conditioned kitchen before heading back to the field again.
“There’s more potatoes,” says Ruth Ann as she passes down the nearly empty basket of rolls before offering up her two desserts – strawberries and angel food and pineapple cake.
Yet here, amid Pratt County, while technology has changed, the Barker farming tradition is long and deep rooted – going back 135 years when Galen Carter Barker broke the native grasslands with a horse and plow.
Helping bring in the state’s nearly 9 million acres of wheat each year has now flowed through the family’s veins for four generations.
At 84, the family patriarch, Carter Barker, is embarking on his 72nd wheat harvest. He still drives the old wheat trucks back and forth from the field to the elevator. Son, Gary, 63, came back to the farm about 40 years ago after college, taking over the operation.
But sometimes, even in the wheat fields of Kansas, family traditions gradually come to an end.
The father and son, it seems, are the last generation of Barkers to farm.
Gary and Ruth Ann’s children both have their own professions – Matthew is a nutritionist at at a pet food company, and Bryce works in security at a prison. As Gary puts it, after years of driving machinery during high school and college, neither had an interest in coming back.
But as fate would have it, strangers do become family.
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