Fundamentally Speaking

Dramatic change in fortunes for the 2025 U.S. winter wheat crop from when first crop rating was released at the end of October, 62% of the crop was in some form of drought (D1-D4).

Now just a month later just 28% was in some form of drought with very good moisture seen last month throughout the Texas Panhandle, all of Oklahoma and into western Kansas and eastern Colorado, all heavy hard red wheat winter producing areas.

Also note that southern IL, IN and Ohio also witnessed good rains in November aiding the fortunes of the soft red winter wheat sown in that part of the country.

This chart shows the last fall and first spring wheat ratings on the left-hand axis while reported on the right-hand axis is the change in U.S. winter wheat conditions from the first to the last fall ratings which essentially is the last week of October into the last week of November.

The figures in the yellow rectangles are the percent that year's final yield deviated from the 25-year trend.

The USDA released its first condition rating for the 2025 U.S. winter wheat crop at the end of October and using our usual ratings system (where we weight the crop based on the percent in each category and assign that category a factor of 2 for very poor, 4 for poor, 6 for fair, 8 for good, and 10 for excellent and then sum the figures), the initial rating came out to 626.

This was the second worst first crop condition rating since national data began in 1986 with only the 2023 U.S. winter wheat crop rating of 562 worse.

The final fall rating released the week of Thanksgiving showed conditions now at 688, a 62-point improvement which is the largest advance between the first and last fall winter wheat ratings since November 2010 for the 2011 U.S. crop and the fifth best improvement since the 1988/89 season.

In three of the four other years, including all three on this graph, relatively high crop ratings persisted through the winter resulting decent crop conditions by the time the first spring rating is released the first week of April.

As we have noted a number of times however, the first fall, the final fall and even the first spring winter wheat ratings are poor predictors of how the crop will actually fare with correlation rates of -5.4%, 11.3% and 19.2% respectively vs. the percent final yields deviate from the 25-year trend.

Growing conditions in May and June are far more important, especially during the critical head filling state as poor early crops have gone on to recover quite well and vice-versa.

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