US All Wheat Area Falls on Fewer Winter Wheat Acres

Jun 28, 2024

The USDA has lowered its 2024 all wheat planted area estimate, with the entire decline due to fewer winter wheat acres.

In its acreage report Thursday, the USDA pegged the 2024 national all wheat area at 47.24 million acres, down from its March estimate of 47.49 million and 5% below the previous year. The all wheat number also fell short of the average pre-report trade guess of 47.65 million acres.

At 33.805 million acres, winter wheat area for harvest in 2024 was reduced by about 1% or 330,000 acres from the government’s previous estimate of 34.135 million and is now 8% below a year earlier. On the other hand, the USDA raised its durum acreage estimate to 2.17 million acres from March intentions of 2.03 million, while spring wheat area was left unchanged from intentions of 11.3 million.

With the increase, estimated 2024 durum area is now a major 29% on the year and the highest since 2017, with spring wheat area up a much more modest 1%.

The durum estimated topped the average trade guess of just under 2 million, while spring wheat was largely in line with expectations. Going into the report, the average trade guess had winter wheat area at about 34.2 million acres. Wheat futures were trading between 8 and 13 cents/bu lower after the report’s release.

In the primary spring wheat and durum state of North Dakota, spring wheat area is estimated at 5.6 million acres, up 300,000 from March intentions and 50,000 above the year-earlier level. Meanwhile, durum acres in the state are pegged at 1.2 million, compared to intentions of 1.1 million and 905,000 in 2023.

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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