Agricultural News
Wheat Harvest Rolls Thursday- But Early Morning Rains on Friday Stop the Combines
Fri, 11 May 2012 06:03:59 CDT
Harvest was gathering speed on Thursday- but the rains predicted have materialized and will likely shut down harvest until the end of the weekend at the earliest across the southwestern counties that border the Red River and Texas. A large area of southwest Oklahoma has wheat ready or very close to being ready for harvest- and it's not even mid May as of yet.
Click here for the realtime Oklahoma mesonet Rainfall totals over the last 24 hours- you can see combines are likely to be stopped for a bit.
Our own Jim Apel talked with a couple of elevators in the southwest on Thursday afternoon- Chase Cassidy with Cassidy Grain in Frederick. He indicated the flow of wheat was steady, but it was not yet a free for all- He told Apel that yields were ranging from 39 to 50 bushels per acre- had heard nothing under 39 bushels from his producers this week. He adds that they were still a little on the green side- but that a couple of hot, dry, windy days would solve that. The test weight report from Cassidy was from 60 to 63 pounds per bushel.
Apel also talked to Garrett Long with Gavilon Grain in Altus, who did not paint as rosy a picture about yields- especially south and west of Altus- those yields were from 20 to 25 bushels per acre- test weights are close to 60 pounds per bushel. He expects yields to pick up into the 30s once they see wheat come in from east and north of Altus. Gavilon was fairly busy on Thursday- Long said things had "picked up the last couple of days" and they would probably have taken in over a 100 trucks of wheat by the end of the day on Thursday.
We were in the Apache area on Thursday afternoon- and took a few pictures of wheat fields- click here for a Flickr set of photos of those pictures from May 10, 2012 in and around Apache. These pictures are a part of our continuing 2012 WheatWatch coverage, a service of the Oklahoma Wheat Commission, working hard for Oklahoma Wheat Producers.
It was an interesting "tweet" from Jimmy Kinder of Walters, who said they were busy harvesting wheat on their farm, but had to quit and move the combines over to start direct cutting canola, because they could not get their trucks back from the elevator in a timely fashion- implying the lines were long to dump wheat at the elevator in Walters on Thursday afternoon. Kinder added that they were planning to store their canola in large grain bags, which eliminated the trip to the elevator during harvest for that crop.
Speaking of canola, another "tweet" we received was a direct message from Josh Bushong, OSU extension canola specialist, who said he had heard of yields mostly in the mid 20s with a few as high as the upper 30s. That would translate as twenty five to 38 bushels per acre- or 1250 to 1900 pounds per acre. The economics of canola, based on cash prices of $12.50 to $13 per bushel, looks really good as we hit the harvest season- especially when you compare it to current cash wheat prices around $5.50 per bushel.
We have summarized what we have gathered from multiple sources in an audio report- click on the LISTEN BAR below to take a listen.
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