U.S. Winter Wheat Forecast Down About 20 Percent
May 15th, 2009Via: AP:
The nation’s farmers are expected to harvest about 20 percent less winter wheat this season, in part because of fewer planted acres and exacerbated by floods and other weather conditions, the Kansas Agricultural Statistics Service said.
Nationwide, winter wheat production was forecast at 1.5 billion bushels, down 20 percent from last year. The nation’s production is expected to come from 34 million acres with average yields of 44 bushels per acre. Winter wheat acreage this season is down 14 percent.
“The drought really got Texas and it was the freeze that finished up the better Oklahoma wheat-producing areas. And southern Kansas was touched by the freeze as well,” said Mike Woolverton, grain marketing economist at Kansas State University.
Tuesday’s forecast comes at a time when wet conditions are keeping farmers from planting their spring wheat. The window for spring-planted wheat typically ends by mid-May; after that yield potential plummets because of hot weather during pollination, Woolverton said.
Wheat planting is far behind schedule in Montana, North Dakota and Minnesota, he said. Some farmers are now considering putting those acres instead into soybeans, which can be planted later in the season when their fields dry out.
But in Kansas, the nation’s largest wheat-producing state, the winter wheat crop was expected to be down only 4 percent from a year ago. The state was spared much of the freeze damage because its wheat was less mature and therefore less vulnerable when temperatures dipped below freezing in April. Cool, wet weather since then also helped the Kansas wheat crop recover.
This is the reason I’m out here in the sticks planting as much of everything that I can. I will not be caught flat footed when the world runs short of food.
I’m just guessing, but I bet the small family farms are the ones planting the least. A couple of fields around where I live are fallow this year, one has goats on it.
Got Cowpeas?
This week there was a spate of articles about a dry region west of Fresno that had its agricultural water cut. I think these are biased. While it isn’t the case there is zero jobs for wildlife protection tradeoff, low precipitation and storage caused part of the cutoff. Also, the SW part of the Central valley has lots of thirsty cotton. North of the delta, they cut off rice fields. Californians and americans want domestic vegetable, nut and grain production, but the rice and cotton is often exported. Thus farms with moderate water use are competing with these big industries for water, and conservers in the city see their saved water used inappropriately. Fox is motivated to blame all the 15%+ unemployment on water cutoffs, but notice NPR has the same message with their chainsaw sound. I think westmoreland sent out a press release that they copied.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mdPnHO8DWY
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103950335