Kansas’ 2015 wheat crop looks only slightly better than last year’s dismal harvest

The Kansas wheat crops looks better than last year’s terrible crop, but not a lot better, according to a detailed assessment this week.

Two days into the annual Kansas Wheat Tour, in which people in nearly two dozen cars made hundreds of stops in wheat fields across the state, the average yield was 34.4 bushels per acre.

That is up from 32.8 bushels per acre estimate in 2014, when Kansas had the worst harvest in 25 years. But it is still the second-worst average since 2007.

The numbers are used to estimate a state harvest, which is useful to companies that buy, hold and sell wheat. Tour participants range from farmers to grain buyers for milling companies to international grain brokers.

As in recent years, tour participants blamed the drought for most of the weak results, even though it has tempered in most of the state. In the extreme southwest counties, wheat farmers are getting just 10 to 20 bushels per acre. A few counties east, the fields start to look better, thicker.

Daryl Strouts, president and CEO of Kansas Wheat Alliance, said they stopped for lunch in Dodge City.

“It was a pretty dramatic change once you got east of Dodge,” he said. “We got an average of 20 bushels per acre in the morning and 39 bushels after lunch.”

Some said the fields in the central counties were also showing signs of stripe rust.

The tour riders left from Manhattan for Colby on Tuesday. On Wednesday, they drove from Colby through southwest and south-central Kansas to Wichita. The participants gathered Wednesday evening to compare notes.

Jim Shroyer, Kansas State Extension Service wheat specialist emeritus, said he was pleasantly surprised by the condition and quality of the crop in the central parts of the state but not once he got to the state’s northwest region.

“One of the people described a field as ‘a moonscape,’ ” he said.

Even in the better sections of the state, there is tremendous variability, he said. The reason: spotty rainfall. It now feels lush in places because of recent rains, but the plants have been struggling with drought until three weeks ago.

“Even as you get closer to Wichita, you’re not seeing the 50 and 60 bushels like you normally see; you’re seeing 35 to 45,” Shroyer said.

The tour continues through eastern Kansas on Thursday.

This story was originally published May 6, 2015 at 9:48 PM with the headline "Kansas’ 2015 wheat crop looks only slightly better than last year’s dismal harvest."