Winter Wheat Tour - Day 3
How Many Lives Does Wheat Have?
MANHATTAN, Kansas (DTN) -- There's a saying in Kansas that wheat has nine lives. Last weekend's blizzard-like conditions used up a couple of those lives in certain parts of the state. The question now is how many lives does it have left?
Scouts on the Wheat Quality Tour looking at the hard red winter wheat crop spent Thursday morning pulling samples through central Kansas from Wichita to Manhattan. This is the final day of the tour.
The official weighted tour estimate for three days was 46.1 bushels per acre (bpa) over 469 stops. However, the extreme variety of conditions led scouts to estimate total production at 282 million bushels of production for Kansas, which represents about 20% abandonment. If realized, that would represent 185 million bushels less than the 2016 crop.
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Dave Green, Wheat Quality Council executive vice president, said that number could vary greatly since the wild card is the potential of wheat that is still digging out from a freak snowstorm that stacked up 20 inches in some areas. There were also freeze events that happened outside the snow event.
Thursday's shortened day of sampling turned out to be a stark contrast to the first two days of the tour. Wheat in the central part of the state was estimated at an average 58.9 bpa over 42 stops, which was actually 5.4 bpa higher than 2016. Water-logged fields were the biggest issue, but scouts did report seeing barley yellow dwarf, some loose smut and a smattering of stripe rust. Wheat doesn't necessarily like wet feet and more disease pressure is a threat. Fungicide applications were being applied in some regions.
The other big surprise of the tour was the amount of Wheat Streak Mosaic Virus (WSMV) that had infested fields. Abandonment had already occurred in some regions because of this viral disease.
The Wheat Quality Council doesn't officially predict what the crop will yield or production figures, said Green. The formulas and process were developed to teach what to look for in the crop and try to improve overall knowledge about wheat.
The organizers said the estimated averages this year might have been slightly skewed toward central Kansas since scouts were not always able to draw a sample in snow-capped regions. Also the reduced number of wheat acres sometimes made it difficult to actually find a wheat field in some regions. Farmers along the route noted that they believe the Kansas harvest will be 10 days ahead of normal.
It doesn't help the mood that July Kansas City Wheat has been down 18 cents today, said DTN analyst Darin Newsom. "There are lots of guesses, but it's still too early to see what damage has been done to wheat in those hard-hit areas," Newsom said.
He added, "We won't know what the wheat crop is, good or bad, until the combines roll through the fields and bushels are hauled to town."
Pamela Smith can be reached at pamela.smith@dtn.com
Follow on Twitter @PamSmithDTN
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