Nearly half of the winter wheat in Kansas, often the biggest wheat-producing state in the country, is in poor or very poor condition as the growing season opens across the United States, said the USDA in the first of this year’s weekly Crop Progress reports. Drought, ranging in intensity from moderate to exceptional, covers much of the central and southern Plains, the heart of winter wheat production.
Winter wheat is the dominant variety grown in the United States and usually amounts to three-quarters of all wheat production. The crop is sown in the fall, goes dormant during the winter and sprouts again in the spring for harvest in late spring or early summer.
Among the 18 states that grow winter wheat, 32 percent of the crop is in good or excellent condition and 31 percent is rated as poor or very poor. That is far worse than a year ago, when 51 percent of the crop was in good or excellent condition and 14 percent was in poor or very poor shape.
Conditions are the worst in the Oklahoma Panhandle and extreme southwestern Kansas, where the drought was rated as “exceptional,” the more dire level used by the weekly U.S. Drought Monitor. None of the wheat in Kansas was listed as excellent, 10 percent was good, 47 percent was poor or very poor and the remainder, 43 percent, was listed as “fair.”
Some 46 percent of winter wheat in Oklahoma and 59 percent in Texas was listed in poor or very poor condition.
Drought “continued to intensify across the central and southern high Plains along with the Southwest during March,” said the National Weather Service in its monthly drought outlook. As winter wheat reaches a critical growth stage, drought is forecast to continue in much of the region. “Drought improvement across the Great Plains is expected to be limited to eastern Kansas, parts of Texas, and South Dakota,” said the National Weather Service.
Growers planted 32.7 million acres of winter wheat for harvest this year, the smallest in more than a century. Wheat has lost ground as corn and soybean plantings expanded.