Prabhupada Insight Into Wheat

Madhava Ghosh Dasa: I'm from wheat country. My family used to plant a thousand acres of wheat every year, so I grew up with wheat. It was part of my life. When I went out to expand my horizons, I'd meet people who had only seen wheat in a bread wrapper and didn't know anything about it. It was a culture shock for me, but I got used to it. In July, when the wheat was ready to combine, Srila Prabhupada was sitting in a chair, when he looked at the field and said, "The wheat needs water? The wheat needs rain?"

I'd been listening while the big shots had been talking to Prabhupada, but now Prabhupada was talking wheat, which is where I live. I could talk now. This was practically the only conversation I ever had with Prabhupada, and I disagreed with him. I said, "No, Prabhupada, it doesn't need any rain. It's ready to harvest, and you don't want rain during harvest." Then I realized where Prabhupada was coming from. He was saying that the crop was not good, that the crop was weak. Immediately, my respect for him went way up, because not only did he recognize that it was wheat (it sounds funny, but people often don't know a wheat plant when they see it), but he knew it was a poor crop. That takes a bit of an eye. I could see that Prabhupada had some insight into wheat, and I said, "Yeah, we had an off year this year." That was neat.