The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

PRESCOTT - Last summer, a Canadian bicycle rider making her way across the country stopped in Waitsburg.

Being from the wheat belt in the flat-as-a-pancake province of Saskatchewan, she remarked on the pitch of the wheat fields in the hills around the Touchet Valley.

"Our farmers wouldn't know what to do with that," she said about the challenge of cultivating such steep terrain.

Growing wheat in the rolling Palouse has never been easy. There's not enough rainfall for an annual crop on higher elevations where angles can be as big as 40 degrees. But the biggest problem farmers run into is erosio...