The Wheat Field

Gene Kloss

"The Wheat Field" is a small etching with a large subject, the New Mexico landscape, in this case featuring its agriculture, which is mostly local. Farmers are cutting the wheat using a team of horses with a mower as two farmers are stacking wheat into drying mounds before sheaving, using pitch forks.

Kloss noted about a similar work of the same subject "New Mexico Harvest":

"And the real economic wealth of America was and is the harvesting of crops. The Indians harvested corn, beans, squash, yucca pods for sugar, wild plums for fruit, plenty of wild game for meat. Today in northern New Mexico, the crops are winter wheat, corn, pinto beans, red potatos, chili, apples, livestock, alfalfa.

Before the advent of mowing machines and combines, wheat was cut by sickle, the sheaves taken to a goat or horse corral and threshed by the trample of feet, winnowed by tossing the grain from wide baskets in the breezy air."