American hard red winter crop recovers, a little

Late-season rains have modestly improved the fate of the United States hard red winter wheat crop.

“I would say the crop is better off but I’m not sure that equates to significantly higher yields,” said Mark Hodges, executive director of Plains Grains.

The United States Department of Agriculture issued an estimate on May 12 forecasting 16 million tonnes of production, down 21 percent from last year and the smallest crop since 1963.

There has been significant rainfall since that time in many key HRWW growing areas of the country. Some areas of central Kansas received 280 to 400 millimetres of rain over the past six weeks.

“Most producers feel a little bit better, that it’s not all doom and gloom,” he said.

Alan Hoefling, head broker with The Money Farm, agrees that the rains have been beneficial.

“It did help the wheat in Kansas and Oklahoma and Colorado,” he said.

He spoke to a farmer in Garden City, Kansas who was expecting his wheat to yield 30 bu./a prior to the rainfall. He now thinks he might get a 40 bu./a crop.

Any yield bump would be welcome because supplies of the crop are going to be extremely tight.

Beginning stocks of HRWW are an estimated 9.8 million tonnes heading into the 2022-23 crop year, according to the USDA. That is the lowest level since 2015-16.

So, any potential yield bump was bound to grab the attention of the markets and it did. Nearby futures on the Kansas City Board of Trade were down about US$2.50 per bushel from their May high as of June 3.

But Hodges said it is still going to be one of the worst crops he has seen in his 50 years in the agriculture business.

If you draw a straight line from central North Dakota through Texas, more than 90 percent of the wheat grown west of that line is experiencing drought conditions and, in some cases, serious drought.

“This is as widespread as I’ve ever seen it in my career,” he said.

“The western half of the U.S. is taking it on the chin.”

While the rainfall was welcome and should help recharge depleted soil moisture levels in the Southern Plains, some of the wheat was too far gone to benefit from it.

For instance, it likely did not change how many tillers or heads there where in many wheat crops in Texas and Oklahoma because they were already too far along the development curve when the moisture finally arrived.

And there was not much of a root system under crops in places like Kansas, limiting the area from which the wheat crops can pull water from.

But there is no doubt that it helped boost yields for some crops.

The USDA was initially forecasting 1.63 million tonnes of HRWW production in Hodges’ home state of Oklahoma, which would be about half the size of last year’s harvest.

He said the rain won’t bring the crop back to anywhere near last year’s levels but maybe farmers will get 60 percent of a crop instead of half.

Plains Grains has contracts with 11 states that grow HRWW to pull samples and evaluate them for quality characteristics. The company compiles that information for U.S. Wheat Associates to help market the crop.

Hodges said early indications are that it will be a high protein crop, which makes sense because that often happens during drought years.

However, it is likely that some farmers cut back on fertilizer this year due to high input costs, so that is not a slam dunk conclusion just yet.

Tags: yield, Hard Red Winter-wheat, rains, HRWW, United States, Production, crop