I have been DYING to go on a crop tour since I started this job in December 2019. I didn’t even bother asking permission to go on this one – I just straight up told Mike Wilson I was going to Kansas. This year was too important of a year to miss.
Against an economic backdrop of drought in Argentina, debt ceiling negotiations in the U.S., the Russian war in Ukraine, and the vast unknowns of China’s volumes, global wheat stocks (less China) remain at the tightest level since 1995.
World demand for wheat isn’t slowing down either – it continues to rise due in no small part to population growth in China even as supplies have remained constricted following last year’s Russian invasion of Ukraine.
After a short hard red winter wheat crop last year, the U.S. needed a healthy crop this year to keep global and domestic buyers satiated at an affordable cost. But as I discovered on the Wheat Tour last week and you’ll soon find in this article, we aren’t going to get that lucky this year.
Winter Wheat Tour 2023 findings
My amazing colleague, Kansas Farmer editor Jenni Latzke, and I spent a lot of windshield time last week travelling across Kansas with the Wheat Quality Council’s annual Winter Wheat Tour to scope out winter wheat conditions in the country’s largest winter wheat producer. Jenni took amazing pictures you can view here (and you need to look to see just how bad it is in Kansas).
Prior to the tour’s start, Kansas State agronomist Romulo Lollato shared that Western Kansas is anywhere between 30-75% below average moisture accumulation since last fall. Early planted wheat crops (late September ’22) showed signs of drought damage, but crops planted at the peak planting window (late October ’22) struggled severely amidst the lack of soil moisture.
If you divided Kansas into thirds, from east to west the respective sections would be labeled “OK,” “bad”, and “hellscape.” Crops in the east – particularly in the Southeast (excluding soft red winter wheat acres) – were the best we saw on the trip as we drove north from Wichita yesterday but even then, we saw fields that could normally yield 80 bpa plus that were only pulling 60 bpa at best.
The crop deteriorated the further west we traveled. Central Kansas had some bright spots, though plants were consistently stunted, and heads were smaller than average. Most fields that I saw were largely in the flowering stage, though we started to see more stunted development as we traveled further west.
By the time we arrived in Colby on Tuesday night, we could sample very few fields because they had been zeroed out. We found very few fields to sample on Wednesday as we drove further into Southwest Kansas. And if we weren’t scared before that point, we got very scared very quickly.
Most farmers in the region will likely zero out their dryland fields – if they haven’t already. We saw numerous sprayers applying Roundup or saw fresh sprayer tire tracks that indicated that the growers would kill off the crop (to stop it from taking out any further soil moisture) and fallow it for the summer because it is too dry to plant anything else at this point.
Source: farmprogress.com
Photo Credit: Wheat Quality Council
Categories: Kansas, Crops, Wheat