From drought to ping-pong size hail and unseasonable warmth, weather extremes have wheat farmers reaching for their phones to ring their insurance adjusters to assess the viability of their crops.
Oklahoma farmer Dennis Schoenhals made the call a few weeks ago, after a storm hammered his wheat with icy chunks, bending the stalks in half, while only dropping an inch of rain.
“We thought we were really going to have a good crop — the best crop we’d ever had — and then we got hit by hail,” he said. “According to the adjuster, we’ve had about 70% damage. We lost 70% of our yield.”
But with just a week to go before he harvests, Schoenhals added, “It’s too late to bail.” So he’ll run his combine, salvaging what he can and tilling the rest as a way to improve the soil for the next crop.
Farmers across Kansas — the US’s top wheat producing state — relayed similar stories this week as crop scouts with the Wheat Quality Council’s annual crop tour fanned out to inspect fields of hard red winter wheat there, as well as in parts of Oklahoma and Nebraska. The group of 60 included grain buyers, agricultural economists and university researchers.
Their reports validated farmers’ worries. Freezes and frost left patches of damage in some fields, while a persistent drought stunted plants, which have struggled to fill out in dry, crumbly soil even as warm temperatures have prompted them to mature earlier than usual. Diseases like wheat streak mosaic have only added to the problem.
Yields for the state came in at 38.9 bushels per acre after 394 field stops, according to the final estimate Thursday from the crop tour. That’s well below last year’s forecast of 53 bushels per acre. A survey of the tour’s participants pegged Kansas wheat production at 218 million bushels, the second-lowest going back to 1972.
The conditions have many producers bracing for a tough harvest amid a drought that has swept across 71% of the nation’s winter wheat growing areas. The US Department of Agriculture this week estimated a 25% decline in US winter wheat production “primarily on sharply reduced Hard Red Winter production,” a variety preferred by Kansas growers.
That forecast helped send wheat prices up by the daily trading limit on Tuesday — a surge that had some wheat buyers on the crop tour “sweating bullets,” according to Kansas Wheat chief executive officer Justin Gilpin. He said the market move was unexpected, as the stress that fields have been under is no secret.
“We all expected to see drought-stressed wheat, lower yields and stuff that we’ve been talking about for the last couple of weeks,” Gilpin told crop scouts on Tuesday night during a recap of the tour’s first day of inspections. “So basically, I feel like we confirmed today some of the concerns in the market.”
In this environment, it’s not surprising that insurance adjusters have been a common topic on the tour.
Gary Millershaski, who produces wheat in Kearny County, said he had a crop adjuster out last week, and now plans to graze cattle on all but one or two of the fields he had evaluated. He blamed the lack of rain and the heat.
“As soon as we get the cattle off, then they will be fallowed,” Millershaski said, adding that he will wait for rain before planting those fields again. “We have to build up moisture before we can ‘roll the dice’ again.”
At Dean Stoskopf‘s farm in central Kansas, the best wheat field is the one he was able to fertilize with nitrogen and phosphate he bought before prices jumped because of the Iran war. But another field — nourished only by the nitrogen left by last year’s alfalfa crop — withered without moisture.
“If you get out in the field, you’ll see big cracks,” Stoskopf told crop scouts. “When it doesn’t rain, there isn’t much you could do.”
Son-in-law Josh Debes said the family will probably call the insurance adjuster about the withered field, which won’t yield a harvest.
In Rice County, Don Miller eyed one of his wheat fields, watching as wind rippled through the shorter-than-normal stalks. While Miller said he is hopeful he can still eke out 25 to 30 bushels per acre here, the continuing dryness in the area isn’t helping.
“I’ve shut the planter off,” Miller said. “I should be planting soybeans right now but there’s no moisture to bring it up.”
Vance Ehmke, who grows wheat for seed, said that between fields eaten up by wheat streak mosaic and the drought, he’s worried that the crop about to be harvested is no better than chicken feed.
“It’s a nightmare out there,” he said. “You don’t know whether you’re coming or going with this weather.”
Photo: Crop scouts taking measurements in a wheat field in Kansas this week. Photographer: Erin Ailworth/Bloomberg
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