The extraordinary tale of the Heart Mountain camp’s agricultural program — and the quest to turn the high desert into verdant farmland — will be recounted in a Wednesday program at the Cody library. Heart Mountain Interpretive Center executive director Dakota Russell will present “The Heart Mountain Miracle” at 6 p.m. The presentation is free and open to the public.

With their advanced backgrounds in agriculture, plus ingenuity and hard labor, the farmers incarcerated at Heart Mountain were able to turn a dry stretch of high desert into a life-sustaining oasis. Heart Mountain incarcerees suffered from issues of both food quantity and quality from the time of their first arrival in August 1942.

For much of their first year, those at Heart Mountain relied on food shipments to come by train from Denver and Kansas City. The timing and contents of these shipments was always unpredictable.

Overcoming lack of irrigation as well as the extremely short growing season of the northern-most confinement site, members of the Heart Mountain Agriculture Department pooled their collective farming experience and knowledge of planting techniques and soil science to produce enough crops to feed the 11,000 residents of the camp.

The first intense winter of 1942 and spring of 1943 consisted of backbreaking work completing the irrigation canal and readying the ground for spring planting with insufficient equipment. But the farmers, originally from California and Yakima Valley, Washington, then planted seeds gathered from stockpiles in California and donated by a local Japanese American family.

The Heart Mountain agriculture program grew some 52 different types of vegetables. In most cases, they experimented with multiple varieties of each type. Among the seeds collected from the West Coast, a number of Japanese vegetables were used, including daikon, nappa cabbage and gobo, to name only a few.

In one way or another, almost all of the camp had become involved in the farming effort. By the end of the summer, over 1,400 acres had been plowed, yielding 2,069,735 pounds of produce. The camp’s engineering department designed and built two massive root cellars, each stretching over 300 feet long, to hold the harvest.

Currently, the whole area cultivated by the Japanese American incarcerees is now in heavy agricultural production. Homesteaders and post-war farmers built on the groundwork laid by the Japanese American farmers, even adopting some of the innovations that allowed the incarcerees to grow crops never before dreamed of in Wyoming.