Wheat and More ... or Less

As disastrous  as the hard red winter wheat crop was in Texas and Oklahoma, the western Kansas wheat crop just keeps getting better and better the further north you go.

Here on our farm in Lane and Scott Counties, it’s common to have yields of 60 to 65 bu/acre with test weights, in cases, over 65 pounds per bushel. I was a little concerned about where protein contents would wind up based on the presence of yellow berries. But after looking at grain coming from fields with yields of 75 bu/acre, I’m more hopeful now that protein will be alright. Even in the case of very high yields, the grain was very uniformly dark.

This morning I talked with a farmer from Gove County who says they’re averaging 68 bu/acre on yield.  From earlier reports, northwest Kansas will have stronger yields than in southwest Kansas. The problem with southwest Kansas is that it’s just a little too close to Texas and Oklahoma.

We had a lot of trouble earlier in getting combines rolling because there were so many green spots in the fields. Those have pretty well disappeared, but we do have a lot of variability in yield—one of our cutters said on one field, the yield monitor said we had a yield range of everything from l8 bu/acre to ll8 bu/acre.

So, at the end of the day, this crop was waiting for. It’s an especially fun crop because we all remember how bad it was looking in early April before we got timely rains.