wheat crop

Rising levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will reduce the amount of nutrients in staple crops such as rice and wheat, say researchers at Harvard's public health school. As a consequence, more than 1 billion women and children would lose a large amount of their dietary iron intake and be at larger risk of anemia and other diseases.

Widespread rainfall in northwestern Kansas eased arid conditions in the No. 1 winter wheat state as this year’s crop nears maturity, said the weekly Drought Monitor. Still, some 69 percent of Kansas remains in drought.

When the seed bank in Tal Hadya, Syria, was threatened with destruction in the civil war that has engulfed that country, the seeds were smuggled out. Now, some those seeds — from wild wheat relatives in the Fertile Crescent — are being planted in the American Midwest in the hopes that they can protect the U.S. wheat crop from the pests and disease brought by a changing climate, according to FERN’s latest story, published with Yale Environment 360. <strong>No paywall</strong>

Europe and Russia are not likely to repeat their bumper wheat harvests of 2017, setting the world on track for the second year in a row of smaller wheat output, said the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

Wheat growers sowed 31.2 million acres of winter wheat for harvest this spring, the lowest figure since 1909 for the dominant type of U.S. wheat, according to a survey of farmers by Farm Futures. It would be a declne of 4.5 percent from last year and reflect poor profit potential of the wheat compared to other crops.

Wheat production in Australia is down by 36 percent from a year ago because of drought, said the USDA’s World Agricultural Production report.

Eight months after he was elected president of the National Association of Wheat Growers, David Schemm resigned to pursue, in NAWG's words, "other professional opportunities in his home state of Kansas." The High Plains Journal said Schemm "has reportedly been tapped to accept the position of Kansas Farm Service Agency executive director," but there was no official word.

Hybrid seeds are widely used by corn and rice farmers because they boost yields. Researchers at the University of Adelaide in Australia, one of the world's leading wheat-producing nations, say they have identified a naturally occurring gene in wheat that, when turned off, allows cross-pollination, essential for hybrids, while preventing self-pollination.

Farmers taking part in a survey about cover crops reported a nearly 3-percent increase in wheat yields when cover crops are used in the offseason, says the Conservation Technology Information Center. This was the first time the survey compiled enough responses to calculate the impact on wheat; past surveys associated cover crops with higher corn and soybean yields.

U.S. wheat plantings are the smallest in nearly a decade because of low market prices and large stockpiles worldwide, so growers in traditional wheat states are experimenting with alternative crops, says The Associated Press. They are dabbling in "crops that might be less iconic but are suddenly in demand, such as chickpeas and lentils, used in hummus and healthy snacks."

Flooding from tropical storm Harvey, the most powerful storm to strike the United States as a hurricane in more than a decade, will disrupt wheat shipments from the ports of Houston and Corpus Christi, says Ben Scholz of the Texas Wheat Producers Board. Scholz told Bloomberg that most of the Texas wheat crop was not affected by Harvey but exports could suffer.

The world's most widely grown crop, wheat, could become "a super nitrogen-efficient crop" if plant researchers succeed in cross-breeding a trait called biological nitrification inhibition into the staple grain, says the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). Wheat plants use about 30 percent of nitrogen fertilizer applied to fields at present, but if the trait can be introduced into the plants they will become more efficient users and suppress loss of nitrogen from the soil.

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.

For wheat farmers in western Kansas, the heavy snow and freezing temperatures that recently swept through their region were a one-two punch that flattened a promising crop.