Wheat Harvest Review: Cool, Wet Spring Surprises Producers With Better-Than-Expected Yields

Jul 14, 2023

After months of drought throughout much of Oklahoma, it finally rained, delaying the conclusion of a rare year in wheat production. The last fields of the 2023 harvest are expected to be cut this week.

Initial predictions for this year’s yields were grim, and although some wheat fields were failed by insurance adjusters or baled for forage, producers were pleasantly surprised at the quality of the wheat they cut.

Southwest: Tillman County

“We ended up cutting exceptional yields,” said Landon Hunt, a producer in Grandfield. “Farmers in this area were astonished at where all the wheat came from.”

A hot and dry April had many producers in the area preparing to call insurance adjusters, but by the end of that month, the weather turned cool and wet, providing ideal conditions for wheat stalk heads to fill with grain.

“Our average wheat yield in this area has been anywhere from 45 to 70 bushels per acre, with really good test weights of 63 to 64 pounds,” Hunt said. “It’s been a phenomenal harvest, and the elevators are full.”

He said strong grain prices throughout 2023 motivated producers to manage their wheat closer this year.

“That extra fertilizer and effort on the part of farmers in this area went a long way in getting this crop across the finish line, and Mother Nature saved us in the nick of time,” he said.

Derek Jacobs, who farms near Frederick, also credits the wet spring weather for saving his crop.

“Yields were all over the board, but it was better than we thought,” he said. “We insured a few fields out, and we had some that made anywhere from 15 bushels to 50 bushels to the acre. The average was low 30s, but the test weight was just unbelievable at 62 to 64 pounds. I guess that goes back to the cooler and wetter May.”

Central: Kingfisher County

Matt Murray, whose production is located near Omega, said his average harvest yields were better than what he had expected at 35 bushels per acre. He usually finishes harvest by the end of June, but this year’s strange spring conditions meant Murray and his neighbors were still combining wheat well into July. A late harvest due to rain also led to problems controlling grass and weeds in his fields.

“We’ll never turn down a rain, but we went from drought to too wet,” he said. “Timely rains helped us out toward the end, I guess, but even the old timers say they’ve never seen anything like this.”

Northwest: Cimmaron County

Scott Arthaud in Boise City failed all his dryland wheat in early April when the crop showed no prospect of producing anything. Other producers in his county who waited to call an insurance adjuster got lucky when it began to rain weeks later. The wheat showed excellent filling, and other local producers baled the wheat for forage.

“Everything feels like it’s about two weeks late out here just because of the cooler temperatures, but the moisture has been great,” he said. “The rain we received in May and June was perfect for my irrigated wheat, which wasn’t as thin.”

The wet and cool spring improved his irrigated wheat that he plans to finish cutting this week, and he expects average yields. Although not all his fields measure the sub-moisture levels he’d like to see just yet, he said his part of the panhandle has turned a corner with drought.

“It’s been a tough two years, but the weather pattern has changed enough that we’re in excellent shape,” Arthaud said. “This is about as good as it gets here in Cimarron County. All the grass is green, and the irrigated yields will be good.”

Northeast: Nowata/Craig County

Wyatt Turney and his family, who reside near South Coffeyville, farm in both Oklahoma and across the state line into Labette County, Kansas. His area did not experience the extreme drought like other parts of the state and fared better, with average yields of 55 bushels per acre for hard red winter wheat and 63 bushels per acre for soft red winter wheat.

“We started June 9, and we were done by June 22,” Turney said. “We had timely rains but didn’t get a single drop of rain in the month of April. Our average test weight was right at 60 pounds, and moisture was 12.5% in almost every field.”

In May, the Oklahoma Wheat Commission reported that an estimated 2 million acres of wheat would be harvested across the state, totaling 40.7 million bushels. The 2023 crop is expected to be lower than the 47.6 million bushels of wheat Oklahoma harvested in 2014.

Source : okstate.edu

Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”