Spring Wheat Harvest Passes Midway Point

Aug 26, 2025

The US spring wheat harvest passed the halfway mark this past week but was still progressing slightly behind the average pace.

According to Monday’s USDA crop progress report, 53% the national spring wheat crop was in the bin as of Sunday, up from 36% the previous week and ahead of 48% last year, but a single point behind the five-year average.

Producers in Minnesota made excellent strides in the field again, with the harvest in that state advancing 24 points from the previous week to 73% complete, well ahead of 51% last year and 59% on average. The Montana harvest gained 14 points to 58% done, compared to 53% last year and 63% on average.

The North Dakota harvest reached 40% complete as of Sunday, compared to 24% the previous week, 40% last year and 43% on average, while the South Dakota harvest was 84% done, up 14 points on the week, 3 points ahead of last year but 4 points behind the state average.

The national spring wheat crop was rated 49% good to excellent as of Sunday, down a single point on the week and 20 points below last year.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids