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Spring Wheat Tour Sees Record Yield Potential in 2015 U.S. Crop.

Jul 31, 2015

Spring Wheat Tour Sees Record Yield Potential in 2015 Crop


By Stephanie Bryant-Erdmann, USW Programs and Planning Assistant

As the combines roll on to harvest 2015 U.S. winter wheat crops, 65 people gathered in Fargo, ND, this week to assess the yield and quality potential of the year’s spring wheat on the annual Hard Red Spring Wheat Tour July 27 to 30. The tour included representatives from some of the largest milling, baking, transportation and grain merchandising companies in the world, as well as major exporting and importing countries, including Canada, Australia, Japan and China. The Wheat Quality Council (WQC) organizes the tour.

I was happy to get “up close and personal” with the crop on behalf of USW. After getting an orientation and hering expert opinions about conditions, we joined teams of four to five people assigned to one of eight daily routes. Teams made ten or more random stops each day to count seed heads and spikelets and calculate estimated yield potential. The teams used that data to determine an average for the route and estimated a cumulative average for the day when we came together in the evening.

At the end of the tour, just a few hours before USW published this issue of "Wheat Letter," the cumulative estimated average yield potential for the hard red spring (HRS) crop was 49.9 bushels per acre (bu/ac) or almost 3.4 metric tons (MT) per hectare. That is the highest HRS yield potential the tour has estimated since it started in 1992.

This year’s tour scouted 446 fields, 43 more than in 2014. Scouts also estimated durum yield potential at 39.2 bu/ac, up from 36.6 bu/ac in 2014. Hard red winter (HRW) had the highest increase in estimated production at 49.0 bu/ac compared to 44 bu/acre in 2014 based on data from eight fields. Total wheat yield, including all three classes, stood at 49.5 bu/ac, the most in the past 10 years.

Following are reports from each day of the 2015 tour. Twitter users can review Tweets and photos from the tour by searching #wheattour15.

Scouts battled challenging conditions on Tuesday, July 28, with a nearby low pressure system pushing unusually high winds. This was not good for the scouts, nor for the wheat. Each team saw significant “lodging” in many fields. On this first day of the tour, Dave Green from ADM reported that participants stopped at 175 locations, up from 162 last year. The day’s estimated average yield of 48.9 bu/ac was slightly higher than last year's day-one average of 47.5 bu/ac, which is in line with USDA’s current spring wheat crop rating.

Julie Ingwersen with Reuters reported from the tour that this is also the highest day-one average in 21 years. Her report included caveats that the real effect of foliar disease pressure will appear at harvest, which could start in southern North Dakota in less than two weeks.

The wind continued to howl on Wednesday, July 29, as teams scouted 173 fields in central and western North Dakota. They calculated an average yield potential of 46.6 bu/ac. Farmers were concerned about the lodging. They said the wind knocked the crop down again after it had recovered from lodging under recent heavy rain events.

“I was done seeding wheat by April 22, the earliest that I have ever finished,” said David Clough, wheat farmer and wheat commissioner from Fessenden, ND. “We seeded in the dust, didn’t get rain, then we finally did. That is why the scouts saw fields at many different levels of maturity, which is somewhat typical, but leaves a portion of the crop vulnerable to shattering. But it is a good crop with some issues so the next few weeks will really be telling.”  

Scouts headed out on Thursday, July 30, for the final day of the North Dakota Wheat Tour as a brief rain shower swept through the area. Half of the cars headed out to continue scouting as usual, while the other half headed over to the North Dakota Mill and Elevator for a tour of the largest single-site mill in the Western Hemisphere before resuming scouting. All the teams came back together in Fargo to calculate final yield projections.

For more information, visit the WQC website at http://www.wheatqualitycouncil.org.