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Dutch tourist's get ride of their lives from Cornish farmer By
Justin Creech
CORNISH -- It was just another day on the farm for Wade Wallace. The day seemed as normal as ever until he saw a white Ford Taurus driving up the steep hill toward him. As the car came to a stop, Wallace got down from the combine-harvester he was operating and said hello to two men he'd never seen before. "The first thing they said was 'We're from Holland, it's flat over there. Farming this hill is unbelievable,'" Wallace said. Wallace and another employee of Koller Corp. had been combining wheat on a hillside when the two tourists from Holland spotted them from miles away. The tourists wanted to learn more about how the large combines could keep from tipping over on the hillside, Wallace said. In order for the tourists to have a firsthand experience of hillside farming, the two combine drivers each took a tourist on board. "We took them onto a very steep field. They kept taking lots of pictures of the combines, but they mostly just kept saying, 'unbelievable.' They got a whole bunch of good pictures to take back to Holland," Wallace said. Evan Koller, owner of Koller Corporation, says farming the hills between Cornish and Clarkston has definite rewards. "You see all kinds of wildlife, and you are out there alone a lot, working long hours." Koller operates a 3,400-acre dry farm, which means there is no irrigation other than the moisture that weather brings. "It can be discouraging if the weather doesn't cooperate, but we've had some triumphs." Ever since World War II the Koller family has been clearing sagebrush, cedar trees and rocks of all sizes to enable them to grow crops on this land. Koller says he's learned a lot from past mistakes, and through those experiences has become more productive. "[Farming is] the art of creation. Being able to work with the land to create something that wasn't there before." Wallace says they grow the crops that bring the money in. "You can make a lot or lose a lot," he said. "This year we raised mustard, which we lost our shirts on, literally." Planning ahead is the key to selling crops at a high price, Wallace says. "We store wheat and sell it when the price is high, usually during winter. We call it winter wheat." Operating the equipment on the farm is not as scary as it may seem, even though the equipment is often tipped at a steep angle. He admits it gets a little scary "when you are moving a direction the machine is not supposed to move." It all pays off in the end, Wallace says. "I get a sense of gratification that I did something productive." It's all in a day's work on the farm.
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