8/19/2011:
August is the golden month in North Dakota. Wheat stalks turn from green to gold in late July and into August; and the golden wheat brings prosperity. Yet wheat growing is fraught with anxiety for the Dakota wheat farmer, for storm or wind or hail or grasshopper or blight can obliterate the crop in a moment or an hour or a night.
One fear is an early killing frost. That happened in 1888, as a deep frost hit Eastern Dakota on the sixteenth of August. The temperatures dipped to 28 degrees at Hope, damaging wheat that had been planted late due to a cold, wet spring. At Ellendale, there was frost, “severe enough to form ice,” according to a report in the Minneapolis Tribune, and farmers had supposedly “quit harvesting and gone to skating.”
In subsequent years, agricultural experts in Northern Dakota sought to educate farmers in frost-fighting techniques. On this date in 1891, Mr. W.W. Barrett, working for the state government, wrote to the Grand Forks Herald to give farmers a “frost preventative,” as he called it. The best way to fight cold was with fire, or, more specifically, with smoke.
Mr. Barrett instructed farmers to build smudge piles made up of “new, dry hay” covered with a layer of “wet, well decayed manure.” He advised farmers to place plenty of these smudge piles on the north and west sides of the vulnerable wheat fields. A smudge pile made up of “half rotten straw” would also suffice to fight frost.
The best time to light the smudge piles was near 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. and to keep the smoke rising until dawn, when the sun would ward off Jack Frost. The coldest time in the August night would be at 3 a.m. in the Red River Valley; while in the west, the coldest time came just before sunrise. Smoke would protect the wheat crop just like a blanket would protect tomatoes, by holding the heat already in the soil near to the fruit or grain.
Barrett tested his principles at his own farm near Church’s Ferry, in Ramsey County, and he found that his smoke screen raised the air temperature surrounding his tender wheat crop as much as three to four degrees, thereby saving the wheat for harvest.
Smoke as a frost preventative is also well known in modern times with citrus growers in Florida and California fighting frost by means of smudge pots.
Dakota Datebook written by Dr. Steve Hoffbeck, History Department, MSU Moorhead.
SOURCES: “Frost Preventative,” Grand Forks Herald, August 19, 1891, p. 5.
“Smoke Clouds Vs. Frost,” Minneapolis Tribune, September 1, 1891, p. 4.
“There Was Frost,” Minneapolis Tribune, August 18, 1888, p. 1.
“What They Say of It,” Minneapolis Tribune, August 18, 1888, p. 1.
Hiram M. Drache, “Bonanza Farming in the Red River Valley,” Minnesota Historical Society Transactions Series 3, no. 24, 1967-68 season, http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/transactions/3/bonanzafarming.shtml, p. 8.