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BILLINGS -- Bruce Wright knew this year’s wheat crop wasn’t going to be one of his best. An unprecedented late August rain had literally washed away some of the grain’s profit.

Down the road, at the Columbia elevator in Belgrade, truckloads of wheat were being turned away for signs of sprouted grain, a problem all too common in parts of Montana where unharvested wheat actually started to grow in the hull after the freak August drenching.

But reaping and sowing are like death and taxes to Montana’s farmers. So, Wright fired up his combine last week and began cutting his way out of a harvest farmers would like to forget.

“It hasn’t been too bad. There’s a little bit of sprout damage,” Wright said. His Columbia Grain elevator is drawing the line at 5 percent sprout damage.

Wright was sure he was beneath the cutoff, but other farmers aren’t so lucky. The damage wrought by rains that fell the weekend of Aug. 24 stretches hundreds of miles from Bozeman to Plentywood, with some farms along the way suffering little to no damage, while others were devastated.

Damaged market