He noted the soil composition of these playa margins. Highly saline, low organic matter, extreme pH variance and minimal growing season moisture. He noted the seed yield per plant, the harvest window, and the fact that the plant required no supplemental irrigation once established in sandy lom substrate. He noted that indigenous populations of the region had used chia as a food staple.
He noted the caloric density of the seed. And then the document moved on to other species and chia was never mentioned again. Walter had read that document in 1951 and filed it back in the satchel. He had thought about it periodically in the 12 years since, not obsessively, but the way a man returns to a detail that doesn’t fit anything he currently needs.
In July of 1963, standing in a field cracked open by drought, the detail finally found its place. The extension office recommended following. The university recommended following. The bank had no recommendation at all, only a date. No institution in deaf Smith County had ever grown commercial chia. The crop appeared in no USDA yield tables for the Texas panhandle.
There was no market infrastructure, no cooperative pricing, no established buyer relationship. It was from every institutional standpoint an unknown. What Walter knew from Hobart’s 1924 document was this. Chia germinated and set seed under conditions that mimicked exactly what his northeast field now offered. No irrigation, saline, alkaline soil, hard cracked substrate, temperatures above 95° during the growing period, and a harvest window in the late October, 2 weeks after his bank note came due, but close enough that a buyer’s letter of
intent might constitute collateral. He did not discuss this with Douglas Farwell. He did not discuss it with Bud Krennic. He drove to Amarillo on July 14th and spent $40 at the Amarillo Public Library, making notes from botanical reference texts and a 1958 Roodell Press publication on seed crops of the southwestern United States.
He confirmed what Hobart had recorded. He drove home, walked the northeast field at dusk, and pressed his boot heel into the soil to test the crust depth. Then he went to the storage barn, and pulled out the 1948 John Deere model, read with oxidized paint on the hood, which had belonged to his father, and which Walter maintained on a quarterly schedule, recorded in a green ledger on the barn wall.
Oil change January 15th and July 15th. Belt inspection April 1st. Carburetor cleaning October reached. The M ran correctly as it always ran. He broadcast seated the 60 acres of dead sorghum ground with chia seed purchased from a botanical supply house in Tucson, Arizona. 12 lbs per acre at 0.18 per pound. A total seed cost of $12960.
He used the ModelM with a broadcast cedar attachment his father had fabricated in 1939 from steel channel and a handc cranked spreader mechanism. He ran it at 4 mph across the cracked ground in passes spaced 12 ft apart. He did not irrigate. He pressed the seed into the surface crust with a corrugated roller. The M pulled behind it.
The work took 3 and 1/2 days. He did it alone. In the second week of August, when the seed had been in the ground for 18 days, Walter drove into the feed store in Herafford for a 50 lb sack of cotton seed meal. Three farmers stood near the loading dock. Ceil Mott, who ran 600 acres of dryland wheat on the Fiona Road.
Pete Alderman who leased county land near the Pia Lakes south of Herford and Tommy Vance who had farmed the section east of Walter’s place for 15 years. Heard you put something in that cracked ground. Ceelott said did Walter said what crop survives in ground like that without water? We’ll see. Walter said.
He took his cotton seed meal and drove home. Pete Alderman told his wife that evening that Walter Puit had finally lost the thread. Tommy Vance said the same thing to his brother-in-law that weekend. Word moved through the county the way agricultural failure always moved. quietly with a kind of collective preemptive grief that was also in some measure relief that it was someone else’s land this time.
Walter did not irrigate the chia. He did not fertilize it. In the last week of August, a half inch of rain fell across the county, the first measurable precipitation since March. Walter walked the northeast field the morning after and observed in the pre-dawn light with his flashlight held at a low angle across the surface the faintest texture change across the cracked soil.
A pale green film almost imperceptible running in the rose where the seed had pressed in deepest. He crouched and pressed his thumb against it. Germination. He stood up, clicked off the flashlight, and walked back to the house for coffee. He did not tell anyone. At the extension office, Douglas Farwell had filed a standard drought report with the Texas ASCS district office in Leach in mid August, listing the affected acreage in Dev Smith County, and noting the producers who had applied for set aside payments.
Walter Puit was not among them. Farwell had noted this in his report as a producer who had chosen not to participate and he had made a brief personal notation in his county records that Walter Puit had planted an unspecified experimental crop on 60 acres of droughtaffected ground. What Farwell had not noted, because he had no reason to, was that in the spring of 1963, the Heraford Brand, the county’s primary newspaper, had run a short wire story from the Associated Press about rising health food markets in California and
New York, citing a USDA commodity report that listed chia seed as an emerging product with zero established domestic production and projected retail demand of between 40,000 and 80,000 annually by 1965. The story had run on page 7. Walter had cut it out and kept it in the Hobart folder.
By midepptember, the chia plants stood 18 in tall across the full 60 acres, blue green and dense, their flower spikes beginning to show purple. Walter walked the rose each morning at first light, his hands moving along the top of the canopy, checking for lodging, the flattening of stems under wind, and finding none. The plants had rooted deeply into the cracked substrate, their taproots following the fracture lines four and 5 in down to where trace moisture still persisted.
The same drought that had cracked the field had in effect created an irrigation system in miniature. In late September, Walter drove to Amarillo and placed a longd distanceance telephone call from a pay phone at the Gulf station on I40 to a health food distribution company in Los Angeles called Western Natural Foods. He had obtained the number from a trade directory at the library.
He spoke to a buyer named Richard Callahan who told him that Western Natural Foods purchased chia seed at zero blouse 62 per pound in lots of 500 lb or more and that they currently had no domestic suppliers. All supply came from Mexico with inconsistent quality. Callahan asked how much Walter expected to have. Walter told him approximately 900 lb based on a conservative per acre yield estimate from Hobart’s 1924 notes.
Callahan said he would send a letter of intent by return mail at 0.58 per pound for the full lot freight paid pickup at the farm. Walter received the letter of intent on October 3rd, 1963. He drove to First National Bank of Heraford that afternoon and presented it to the branch manager, Glenn Hooper. Hooper read the letter twice, then looked up at Walter.
This is a binding purchase agreement. Walter said, “It’s a letter of intent,” Hooper said. “From a California buyer for a crop in the ground right now.” Hooper looked at the letter again. The projected sale amount at 058 per pound on an estimated 900 was 522. That covered less than 4 cents on the dollar of the $14,000 note.
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Hooper did not say this. He said he would need to consult with the board about the bank’s position. He asked Walter to come back in a week. Walter drove home. He did not wait. He had written on September 28th a registered letter to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, which regulated First Nationals lending practices, outlining what he believed to be an improperly structured agricultural operating note that had been rolled over twice since 1959 without reduction in principle.
He had done this not from anger, but from arithmetic. His father had taught him to document everything. The green ledger in the barn held 32 years of maintenance records. A second ledger, Brown, held 32 years of loan payments, interest charges, and correspondence with the bank. The letter to the Federal Reserve cited three specific instances between 1960 and 1962 where First National had rolled Walters note at rates above the maximum permitted under Texas agricultural lending statutes of that period.
He had not mentioned this letter to Glenn Hooper. He also had not mentioned it to the attorney he had consulted in Amarillo in August, a land use lawyer named Franklin Bess, who had reviewed the Brown Ledger and the loan documents and confirmed that the interest overcharges while individually small totaled Hanza 840 over 3 years and constituted a regulatory violation.
Bess had filed a formal complaint with the Texas State Banking Commission on August 22nd, 1963. The commission had opened an inquiry. These things moved slowly, but they moved. The harvest came in the third week of October. Walter cut the Chia with a modified small plot combine, a 1953 Alice Chalmer’s Model 60 that he had purchased secondhand in 1958 for $1100 and maintained with the same quarterly discipline as the Model M.
The machine was painted the original Persian orange of Alice Chalmer’s production, a distinctive color that his neighbor Tommy Vance had once called Gaudy. Walter ran it through the 60 acres over 4 days, the seed catching in the grain tank with a sound like fine sand against a steel. He checked the tank by hand twice per pass, pressing his palm into the seed and lifting it to check moisture content by feel.
Dry, slightly oily with the particular dusty smell of mature chia that Hobart had described in his 1924 field notes as reminiscent of sage after rain. The final yield measured out at 1,40 lb across 60 acres. 19 lb per acre, 3 lb above Hobart’s conservative estimate and well above the 12 lb per acre figure the Rodeale text had cited as a minimum commercial threshold.
Walter weighed it in the grain bins using a certified platform scale and wrote the number in the brown ledger. He telephoned Richard Callahan at Western Natural Foods and gave him the final number. Callahan asked if Walter could hold the seed until the following week as he needed to arrange transport.
Walter said he could. 4 days later, Callahan called back and asked if Walter had additional seed available. A second buyer had contacted Western Natural Foods after hearing they had located a domestic source, and Callahan was trying to fill two orders simultaneously. “I have what I have,” Walter said. “Is there any way you could put in more acreage next season?” Callahan asked.
Walter said he would consider it. The truck from Western Natural Foods arrived on November 2nd, 1963. A flated with a California plate driven by a man who said very little and weighed each of the 12 burlap sacks himself before signing the bill of lighting. The total purchase, £1,140 at 058 per pound.
The check drawn on a Bank of America account in Los Angeles was for 66120. 60 acres, no water, no fertilizer, no irrigation, no USDA program, no extension recommendation, and the drought itself had done half the preparation. Walter’s wife, Irene, stood on the porch when he came back from handing over the bill of lightading.
He showed her the check. That covers the seed cost and a little more, she said. Plus the set aside we didn’t take. We put 60 acres into production instead of Walter said and Callahan wants the same acreage or more next year at 058 minimum. Irene looked at the check. Then she looked at the field. The bare brown posth harvest stubble of the chia stood in the late afternoon light something quiet and stubborn.
If this story is making you think differently about what drought can actually produce, hit that subscribe button. More stories like this one are coming. Word moved through Deaf Smith County the way it always moved, not through newspapers or any formal channel, but through the grain elevator at the co-op on a Thursday morning.
Ceil Mott heard the number from a man who had seen the California truck. He told Pete Alderman. Alderman told his wife. His wife told Tommy Vance’s wife at church that Sunday. By the following Tuesday, three men had driven slowly past Walter’s property on the county road to look at the harvested field, which told them nothing except that the ground was bare and the bins were empty.
Tommy Vance came to the fence line on a Wednesday afternoon in early November, 4 days after the California truck had left. Walter was draining and greasing the Model M’s transmission for winter storage when Vance’s pickup stopped at the gate. “Heard you sold that Chia seed,” Vance said through the fence. “Did?” Walter said.
“What did it net?” Walter wiped his hands on a shop rag. “Enough.” “En enough to cover the note.” “The note is between me and the bank,” Walter said. He turned back to the transmission housing. Vance stood at the fence for another moment. Then he drove away. The note was not covered by the Chia check alone.
The Chia check covered $661 or $20. The note to First National stood at $14,000 plus a crude interest. But in the first week of November, the Texas State Banking Commission completed its preliminary review of the complaint filed by attorney Franklin Bess and issued a finding that First National Bank of Heraford had charged Walter Puit interest in excess of the maximum allowable rate under Texas Banking Code section 5.
02 in each year from 1960 through 1962. The required remedy under the code was mandatory credit of three times the overcharged amount against the outstanding principle. Three times 19040 semi was $5,541. Applied to the note principle, the balance dropped to $8,59. First National was also assessed a $750 regulatory fine, which was the maximum allowed under the 1962 version of the banking code.
Glenn Hooper called Walter on November 8th. He did not discuss the commission finding. He discussed a note restructuring. The bank agreed to extend the maturity date to March 1st, 1964 at a corrected interest rate and to accept Walter’s signed contract with Western Natural Foods for the 1964 Chia crop, now projected at 120 acres, twice the original planting, as additional collateral.
Walter signed the restructured note. He did not thank Hooper. By December of 1963, Douglas Farwell at the county extension office had received three separate telephone inquiries from other deaf Smith County producers asking about chia production. One from Ceile Mott, one from a man on the Castro County line, and one from an operator in Palmer County who had read a brief item in the Amarillo Globe News about a California buyer sourcing Texas Chia.
Farwell had no information to provide. He had recommended following. The crop before him had not followed that recommendation. Farwell drove out to Walter’s place on December 12th, 1963. It was a cold afternoon. the sky the flat white of a high plains December and the harvested field showed nothing except bare stubble and the tire tracks of the California truck still pressed faintly into the soil.
Walter was in the barn when Farwell knocked at the barn door. He was adjusting the spreader mechanism on the broadcast cedar attachment, the one his father had fabricated in 1939, checking the spring tension on the feed gate with a torquy wrench and a piece of bailing wire. Farwell stood in the barn door with his hat in his hand.
“I gave you wrong advice in July,” he said. Walter set the torque wrench down on the bench. He did not say anything for a moment. I didn’t have the information, Farwell said. No. Walter said, “Where did you get it?” “My father had a paper from 1924.” Walter said, “A botanical survey, Hobart, Texas Land and soil commission.” Farwell wrote the name in his pocket notebook.
He asked if he could see the document. Walter went to the farm office and came back with the Hobart carbon copy still inside the cracked leather satchel. He handed it to Farwell without comment. Farwell read it standing in the barn door with the cold air coming in around his ankles. I’ll want to write this up for the extension bulletin, Farwell said. That’s your business, Walter said.
He took the Hobart document back when Farwell was done. He put it in the satchel and put the satchel back in the farm office. Then he returned to the broadcast cedar and resumed checking the spring tension. If stories like this one should reach more people, share this video. Every view helps this channel tell more of them.
Douglas Farwell published a two-page article in the DeFith County Extension Bulletin in March of 1964 titled Drought Tolerant Seed Crop Production on High Plains Dryland Acreage, a case study. He cited Hobart’s 1924 survey by name, described Walter Puit’s 60 acre trial without using Walter’s name, listing him only as a producer in the northeast part of the county, and provided a detailed description of the broadcast seeding method, the seed source, the harvest timing, and the buyer contact information for Western Natural Foods in
Los Angeles. He included a corrected ASCS set aside recommendation noting that producers facing severe aquifer depletion might consider experimental drought tolerant seed crops as an alternative to fullow. He sent a copy of the bulletin to the Texas&M agricultural extension service in College Station which reprinted the relevant section in its statewide quarterly in June of 1964.
By the fall of 1964, four other producers in Dev, Smith, and Palmer counties had planted chia on combined acreage of 310 acres. Three of them contacted Western Natural Foods directly using the buyer information Farwell had published. Richard Callahan, unable to absorb that volume alone, referred two of them to a second California distributor, Sunrise Foods of San Francisco, which had entered the market after seeing Western Naturals purchase records from the previous season.
None of those four producers knew Walter Puit’s name. Two of them had been told about Chia by Douglas Farwell himself at an extension meeting in Fiona in January of 1964. Farwell described the crop’s requirements from the Hobart document and from what he had observed on Walter’s land. He stood at the front of a meeting room at the Palmer County Courthouse and told 32 farmers things that had been sitting in a carbon copy folder in a cracked leather satchel for 40 years.
Pete Alderman was one of the men in that room. He planted 35 acres of chia in the spring of 1964 on the dryland acreage east of the Pia Lake he leased from the county. He harvested 630 lbs that October and sold it to Sunrise Foods at Zobl 55 per pound. He told his wife that evening that he should have listened to Walter Puit in 1963. She said he should have.
He never said this directly to Walter Puit. Walter, for his part, planted 120 acres of chia in 1964 as contracted. He yielded 2,160 at a renegotiated price of 0.61 per pound. Western Natural Foods had agreed to the higher price after the 1963 crop proved purity levels that exceeded their Mexican source material by a measurable margin in laboratory testing.
The total sale was17 NOS $60 combined with a partial recovery from his grain sorghum acreage now possible because he had followed that ground through the drought year and it had partially recharged. His 1964 season produced the first surplus above operating expenses he had recorded in 3 years.
He paid down $2,000 on the principle of the note to First National in November of 1964. Glenn Hooper processed the payment without comment. Walter drove home on US60 with the windows down even though it was November because the air coming off the Yano Esticado smelled like cold in distance and he wanted to breathe it. His son Roy, named for Walter’s father, was 19 years old in 1964 and studying aronomy at Texas Tech in Lach.
He came home for Thanksgiving and walked the harvested chia ground with his father on the morning after the holiday. The two of them moving through the stubble in the pale November light with their breath showing in the air. Roy asked why they kept the 1948 John Deere Model M when the farm had newer equipment.
Walter stopped walking and pressed his boot into the stubble. “It runs,” he said. “The 4020 we rented from Krennic could do this field in half the time,” Roy said. “Renting cost money,” Walter said. He turned and walked back toward the barn. Roy stood in the field a moment longer looking at the Model M through the open barn door, the oxidized red paint, the fabricated cedar attachment sitting on the concrete floor beside it, the green ledger on the wall with 32 years of entries in his grandfather’s handwriting and his father’s.
He walked to the barn and picked up the ledger. He opened it to the first page, which was dated April 3rd, 1931. The same spring his grandfather had handed over the keys and told his father to disc. He didn’t say anything. He put the ledger back on the wall. Walter was checking the carburetor on the Model M, his hands moving over the brass fittings with a careful habitual pressure.
the same check he had performed every October 1st for 32 years. He did not look up. The cedar attachment, Roy said. Granddad made that in 1939. Walter said. Roy looked at the fabricated channel steel, the handwelded joints, the feed gate with its new spring that was listed in the ledger as having been replaced in September of 1963, 2 weeks before the Chia broadcast seating.
The spring was listed by part number. The torque setting was noted. The date was written in pencil in his father’s hand at the end of an entry that otherwise looked identical to every other entry for 32 years. He put the ledger back and stood beside his father while Walter finished the carburetor check. You knew it would work, Roy said. Walter wiped his hands.
Hobart knew it would work, he said. I just read it. The chia ground in the northeast field of Walter Puit’s farm is still visible in aerial photographs from the period. 60 acres that look in the 1964 image slightly darker than the surrounding dryland acreage where the root system had broken the crust and begun to build organic matter into the otherwise exhausted soil.
By 1966, the soil structure on that acreage had improved measurably. A fact documented in a Texas&M extension study that surveyed 17 high plains farms that had transitioned portions of droughtaffected ground to chia production. Walter Puit’s 60 acre parcel showed the highest organic matter increase of any site in the study.
The study cited the land only by parcel number. Walter’s name did not appear. He would not have wanted it to. In the northeast field on a July morning in 1963, the ground had cracked open under a drought that the extension service called historic and the bank called catastrophic. The cracks were 3 in wide. A man with 32 years of knowledge and a 40-year-old document had read those cracks not as damage but as structure, as depth, as drainage, as the exact profile that a seed requiring almost nothing to germinate had always needed.
The drought did not destroy the field. The drought made the field. The land was not ruined. It was in the specific language of Clarence Hobart’s 1924 survey prepared. What looked like an ending was a set of conditions. The man who understood those conditions did not announce that he understood them. He went to the barn, checked the oil on a machine everyone else considered obsolete, and began.
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