PRATT, Kan. – A farmer in Kansas spent months planning and creating wheat field artwork to celebrate his 20-year anniversary with his wife.
Jesse Blasi has been a wheat farmer in Pratt for more than 20 years.
“It’s all the little things that make you happy,” Jesse Blasi said. “It’s when the wheat comes out of the ground. It’s when a baby calf is born.”
The only things he loves more than farming are his wife and family.
He first met his wife Sarah Blasi while in college at a bar.
“As we were both driving home, we saw each other at a stoplight,” Jesse Blasi remembered.
It was love at first stoplight.
So, for their 20th wedding anniversary, he wanted to use his farming expertise to create a work of agricultural art to symbolize his love.
The moment Sarah Blasi saw it from an aircraft last week was captured on video.
“I knew it would make her smile. That was kind of the whole goal was to get the little grin out of her that I like,” Jesse Blasi said.
“That’s Jesse Blasi love,” Sarah Blasi said. “That’s farmer love right there.”
He was actually inspired by another now-famous Pratt farmer.
“Lee Wilson planted a field of sunflowers for his wife and I thought maybe that’s a good idea, and so I’ve always wanted to do this pattern thing and I’m like, ‘I could do that for Sarah! Twenty years is coming up,’” Jessi Blasi said.
Blasi used advanced farming technology to do multi-variety prescription planting. He used a John Deere air seeder to plant two varieties of wheat in order to write the message in his field.
“There’s actually two different varieties of the white color,” Jesse Blasi described. “It’s a blend of two, and like I said, this is just a red chaff wheat.”
Jesse Blasi began the planning process back in October, creating the labor of love with more than 65 million red wheat seeds.
He started planting it back in October. Two types of wheat, two colors, one message.
He took her up in a single-engine plane to fly over their property – something she thought was just a sweet gesture. But as they soared above their land, she looked down and saw it: “Jesse + Sarah, 20 Years” written across their fields in wheat.
The pair says they’re blessed to be in love all these years later, but it’s the family they’ve created together they truly appreciate.
“Even though I’m the farmer, she grows the best crop,” Jesse Blasi said. “We have two girls, Reagan and Avery, and they’re our best crop.”
The wheat work of art should be visible until August or October, but Jesse Blasi says it looks best from between 4,000 to 6,000 thousand feet in the air.
“Just him doing something like this shows it’s just extra. It’s just a little bit extra,” Sarah Blasi joked.
