Agricultural News
Mark Hodges Calls Upcoming Oklahoma Wheat Harvest Half the Size of Last Year's Crop--If We're Lucky
Thu, 09 May 2013 18:05:29 CDT
The extent of the damage from this year's spring weather on the hard red winter crop is beginning to show. There have been multiple freezes across the wheat belt, drought conditions and, in some places recently, heavy rains and hail.
Mark Hodges of Plains Grains spoke with Radio Oklahoma Network Farm Director Ron Hays and says there has definitely been some damage to the crop, but most of it was done before the late season freezes.
"The drought is probably more devastating than what the freezes have been, if you look on a wide-scale basis. And, of course, that starts in South Dakota and moves southward into the Nebraska panhandle. They have had some freeze damage, but the drought has devastated them. They will harvest very little wheat in the Nebraska panhandle."
Hodges said that drought damage in southeast Colorado is extensive as well. He said grasslands have been hard hit, too.
"Even on rangeland, there's not any grass left. If they don't get some moisture, significant moisture, fairly quickly, rangeland's even going to be blowing up there."
Severe drought west of Guymon in the Oklahoma panhandle continues, Hodges says and the bone-dry conditions run down through much of the Texas panhandle.
When thinking about Oklahoma, Hodges said the crop overall is in poor shape coming off of a fairly good year. He said this year's production will be far below last year's.
"It's probably half of what we had last year, realistically, half. We hope it doesn't go any lower than that. It potentially could."
He says producers are also concerned about quality, and rightly so.
"With the freeze, we don't know how much damage there is as I've mentioned before and how that's going to equate out to yields because if we have stem damage and that plant can't conduct nutrients upward, we could have some issues there.
"It's been a blessing on front side from a freeze standpoint that we didn't have more damage than we did because the plants weren't as far along. But, on the other hand, it may be a curse on the tail end that we may have grain fill during a time when we have hot, dry, windy weather which we also don't want.
"And so we're concerned about what those kernel characteristics might be from that perspective. And as you move westward, because of the lack of root system development, we really are going to have to have some timely moisture every week to ten days in those western areas so that that plant doesn't run out of water when the temperatures get above 85 degrees and we get those 30-mile-per-hour southwest winds and 20 percent humidity. There's going to be a lot of water demand on that plant at that point."
He says this may be one of the latest harvests in recent years with combines starting ten days to two weeks later than usual.
"As a perspective, May 3rd last year, we were cutting wheat in Altus."
Hodges says producers and wheat breeders walk a fine line in Oklahoma trying to select wheat varieties that mature late enough to avoid freeze damage, but mature early enough to be harvested before the hot dry winds can do their damage."
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