There's another half a million acres in Oklahoma that were not planted to fall seeded crops in 2017 which will apparently will be up for grabs in the spring of 2018. That means we could see more acres dedicated to cotton, grain sorghum, corn,soybeans or even sesame this spring.
Nationally, the USDA report on Wheat and Canola Seedings says that Hard Red Winter (HRW) wheat seeded area is expected to total 23.1 million acres, down 2 percent from 2017. Planted acreage is down from last year across most of the growing region. The largest declines in planted acreage are estimated in Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. Record low acreage was seeded in Nebraska and Utah. However, both Kansas and Texas increased slightly in their seedings this past fall. In percentages, Oklahoma dropped by nine percent while Kansas increased seedings by three percent and Texas upped their winter wheat acreage by six percent.
The number of acres planted to winter wheat in Oklahoma has fallen for four years in a row- USDA reports that Oklahoma farmers planted 5.3 million acres the fall of 2013 and the fall of 2014- and since then it has fallen to 5 million acres planted in 2015, 4.5 million acres in 2016 and now 4.1 million acres this past fall in 2017- to be harvested in 2018. A large number of the 2016 seedings was never harvested for grain- but rather was grazed out by stocker cattle. The dry conditions of this winter is hindering the plans of many farmers who had hoped to graze their wheat fields and possibly graze on past first hollow stem here in the first of quarter of 2018.
While Kansas added back 200,000 acres of winter wheat planted this past fall- Kansas farmes have also been trending away from planting whea- the fall of 2013 saw Kansas with 9.6 million acres of wheat planted, which means almost two million acres of Kansas wheat land is now most likely in a spring planted crop. Texas planted six million acres of wheat the fall of 2013- this past fall- that number was a million acres less at 5 million acres.
In Oklahoma, the crop that seems to have been the biggest beneficiary of the move away from wheat is cotton- with 215,000 acres planted in the spring of 2015- increasing to 585,000 acres planted this past spring in 2017. With 555,000 harvested in the fall of 2017- and total production pegged on Friday by USDA at 1.06 million bales- it is expected that even more acres may be planted into cotton this spring, if mother nature provides any moisture at all. Click here for the comprehensive 2017 Crop Production report that was released this past Friday from USDA.
It's even easier to pull out the Oklahoma (and Texas) crop information in this summary of crop Production for the two states- click or tap here to access that report.
For Canola- This report contains the first estimate of 2018 seedings for canola for Kansas and Oklahoma. Seedings in Kansas and Oklahoma for 2018 harvest are estimated at a combined 120,000 acres, a decline of 43 percent from 2017. Kansas actually increased total canola acres by ten thousand acres, while Oklahoma had almost impossible weather conditions during the short thirty day planting window that Crop Insurance has established- and saw plantings fall by a hundred thousand acres- from 160,000 in the fall of 2016 to sixty thousand in 2017.
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