wheat

The hard red spring wheat tour of North Dakota concluded with a forecast of an average yield of 48 bushels an acre, a record high, said DTN. "Overall, scouts saw a wheat crop with record yield potential and little disease or pest pressure," said DTN. It said the crop was maturing later than usual. A cold and rainy spring delayed planting for weeks in the upper Midwest and northern Plains.

Bread wheat is a complex plant, with up to 124,000 genes, more than twice the number in rice, the other major food grain of the world. The vast number of genes made some researchers doubt if it is possible to map the genome - "to figure out how its genes are ordered so that specific traits can be more quickly identified. But a group made up of scientists, breeders and growers say that they’re more than halfway there and that an entire sequence is on the horizon," says the Washington Post.

Canadian growers reduced their wheat sowings by 7 percent from 2013 and put more land into canola and soybeans, says Stats Canada.

Sanjaya Rajaram, who worked with Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug and developed 480 wheat varieties, is the winner of the $250,000 World Food Prize for 2014.

Prospects for "historically large" world wheat supplies are likely to result in "a challenging situation for U.S. wheat exports and prices later in 2014," say economists Dan O'Brien and Mykel Taylor of Kansas State University.

The winter wheat harvest, at 16 percent complete, is running 4 points behind average, says the weekly Crop Progress report.

The U.S. winter wheat crop will be the smallest in eight years due to drought in the central and southern Plains, the government said, estimating a harvest of 1.38 billion bushels, 2 percent less than it forecast in May and 10 percent smaller than 2013.

Thanks to forecasts of large harvests, global grain supplies will rise again this year, says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

Farm and baking industry groups in Canada, Australia and the United States, who account for 45 percent of world wheat exports, called for commercialization of genetically engineered wheat.

A lot of wheat in western Kansas has has been "zeroed out for insurance purposes, and a lot more will be," says the chief of the Kansas State University ag experiment station south of Hays in northwest Kansas.

The winter wheat crop, dried by intense drought in the central and southern Plains, deteriorated starkly in the past four weeks, putting the harvest into doubt, USDA data indicate. Some 44 percent of the crop is in poor or very poor condition, according to the weekly Crop Progress report. That's 2 points more than a week ago and 11 points more than April 20. Some 34 percent of the crop rated as good or excellent then. Now, it's 29 percent.

Farm-gate wheat prices could average a record $8.75/bushel if bad weather further reduces the U.S. wheat crop and draws down stockpiles, says economist Dan O'Brien of Kansas State University. Stocks peaked at 976 million bushels in 2010 and have fallen annually ever since.

Researchers from four countries around the world say that as the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere rises, the amount of zinc and iron in wheat, rice, soybeans and field peas went down significantly; wheat and rice also had notable declines in protein content at the higher levels of carbon dioxide used in the experiment. Zinc and iron deficiency is a global health problem.

The weather-damaged winter wheat crop will be the smallest in eight years, if a survey of analysts ahead of USDA's crop report proves correct. The report, due for release Friday at noon ET, is the first field-based USDA estimate of the winter wheat crop. An accompanying report will project the fall harvest for corn, soybean, cotton and rice as well as overall U.S. wheat output.

Kansas, often the No 1 wheat state in the nation, will reap its smallest harvest since 1996 due to drought and freeze damage, scouts estimated at the end of the annual wheat tour. The crop was pegged at 260.7 mln bu with an avg yield of 33.2 bu/ac, said Bloomberg, compared to 319.2 mln bu last year with a statewide yield of 38.0 bu/ac. "Output...would be the lowest since 255.2 mln (bu) in 1996." Analysts had expected a crop of 299 mln bu.

Drought intensified in winter wheat states during April, a crucial period for crop development, according to USDA's AginDrought site. Ten pct of winter wheat land is under exceptional drought, the direst rating on a five-point scale of drought conditions, this week, compared to 4 pct at the start of the month.

The annual Kansas wheat tour moved through southwestern and southern Kansas on Wednesday and scouts projected an average yield of 30.8 bu/ac, compared to 37.1 bu/ac last year and the five-year avg of 38.8 bu/ac. The first day of the tour also found drought-reduced yields.