BELFIELD - Byron Richard watched his pair of combines roll through a bumper crop of golden winter wheat, silky kernels worth very good money.

It's sure a beautiful harvest. It's sure a shame it isn't his.

His wheat back home south of Belfield is toast, as they'd say if it weren't so ironic, because toast is what it could be if drought hadn't shriveled the grain down to nothing.

Richard said he's never had a year like this one when he didn't have something to combine.

He isn't alone. Some parts of the state went to hell in a breadbasket in a weave of good crop, decent crop and no crop at all.

Moisture was short everywhere, but this year an inch or two at a critical stage made all the difference in the wheat world. Richard figures he and his neighbors have seen just a tad bit more than 4 inches of rain since July last year.

In some places, hot summer storms pounded down hail as a final uppercut to the chin.

Instead of harvesting his own wheat, Richard hired out to cut fields southwest of Regent, where the grain was rolling in at 50 bushels an acre under Thursday's bright blue summer skies.

The work provided income for his crew and for payments at the bank: Crop or not, the bills come due.

Shoulder-high corn green as grass with 100-bushel-an-acre potential stands in a field next to the wheat.

"For southwestern North Dakota, that's amazing," Richard said, looking west toward the corn.

His green combine machines running up and down someone else's fields were amazing, too.

"I enjoyed spending all that money on high input," he said, just kidding of course about a number he estimates at $160 an acre. "I put everything out there - fertilizer, fuel, seed - except water."

Belfield is the epicenter of the extreme category four drought region in North Dakota. The worst area is defined as east to west from Taylor to Medora and north to south from Amidon to Fairfield.

Wrapped around that is just the normal drought. Thursday, the National Weather Service predicted drought conditions will persist through October, with some improvement east of the Missouri River.

The USDA recently completed its annual wheat quality tour of North Dakota and found more acres planted to wheat - 8.6 million this year, compared to 8.4 million last year. It also found that wheat quality has taken a substantial hit from a year ago, though overall yield is expected to remain about the same at about 36 bushels an acre.

Richard's neighbor, John Duletski, had a tremendous crop last year.

This year, he's got nothing to show for all his work, nothing to combine, wheat kernels that look weirdly like bits of red rice.

He said he fills the days with other tasks, but he has an empty feeling just the same.

"Seeding time is seeding. Hay time is haying and harvest is harvest," Duletski said. "There's a sense of incompleteness."

He has about 2,000 acres of stunted wheat with mostly empty heads, the color of fool's gold. It might go for livestock feed or grazing, if it isn't too concentrated with fertilizer chemicals it should have drawn up for full growth.

Duletski said he's learned that each crop year is another chapter in the big book. Last year's chapter was about great crop and phenomenal prices. This year is written in dust and red ink, though federal crop insurance at $11.10 a bushel for established producers will greatly ease the financial pain.

He'll clean up the fields and prepare them for next year.

"There's a lot of humility and we learn lessons as we go," he said. "Some we hope we don't have to use again."

Nick Vollmuth, of rural Selfridge in Sioux County, can feel the Belfield area's pain because this prolonged cycle of drought has been particularly tough down where he farms.

Not so this year.

He farms in another of those green "pockets" in the breadbasket, like around Regent, where the right rain fell at the right time.

"It's kind of a small area," Vollmuth said, figuring it doesn't extend much north of Flasher, or east of Elgin. "We haven't had a lot of rain, just timely."

His hay crop was down some, but nothing like Duletski, who rolled 40 bales out of his hay fields, about one-fourth the normal output.

Vollmuth said harvest is running about two weeks later than usual, but he'll see 50 bushels an acre in his winter wheat and about 40 in his spring wheat.

"This is good for our area," he said.

There's a first time for everything, it seems.

Richard said he learned from last year not to sell too much grain on forward contracts, but that was because grain prices shot through the roof after the contracts were called in.

This year, he said, he cut way back on contracts, but the outcome won't be the same. "I can't even come up with the 10 percent (of expected harvest) I did contract this year."

Around Belfield, the drought cuts deep.

For the first time in memory, even spritely Norwegian Creek is bone dry.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511 or lauren@westriv.com.)