Kansas farmers sharply scaled back winter wheat sowings because of low market prices, assuring a smaller crop this year than last. Now disease, snowfall, and freeze damage this spring are dragging prospects down even further. The Wheat Quality Council’s annual three-day winter wheat tour pegs the state’s crop at 281.7 million bushels, which would be down 40 percent from 2016.
A spring blizzard swept through western Kansas over the weekend, burying wheat fields under as much as two feet of snow as the crop rushed toward an earlier-than-usual maturity. Snow cover in the western third of the state prevented scouts from spot-checking crop prospects as often as they normally would.
“It was our decision not to try to estimate yields on those fields,” said Aaron Harries, vice president of research for the grower-funded Kansas Wheat Commission. “We’re able to find some fields where we can determine those things, and we’re using those fields as part of our average.” Scouts gathered data from 469 fields across the state, compared with 655 a year ago.
Based on the tour, the average wheat yield was estimated at 46.1 bushels an acre, far below the 57 bushel-an-acre yield in 2016. The USDA said wheat growers planted 7.5 million acres of winter wheat for harvest this year, down 21 percent from the previous crop. “Tour participants saw many areas where disease, damage from snow, and freeze damage may eliminate those fields. This was accounted for in the final estimates,” said Kansas Wheat.
Analyst Jerry Gidel of the Price Group said the tour’s estimate of yield and total production suggested that 6.1 million acres of wheat will be harvested, compared with the 7.5 million acres planted. The abandonment rate of 19 percent would be the highest since 1996, Gidel said in an email.