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Wheat condition may be like basketballBy Richard C. Snell Barton County Extension Agent, agriculture When you are in the winter wheat belt like we are, the common question of every spring is--How's the wheat look? Even the folks who live in town realize the importance of the wheat crop to the local economy and they want to know what to expect. This year's wheat crop is a mixed bag. At this point there are some areas and certain fields with really good wheat and others that are--well, let's just say, not so good. Being a wildcat fan, I hate to even bring up basketball right now. But there may be some similarities between basketball and wheat. Our women's team had a great season. They won the Big 12 and beat our rival KU both times we played. Unfortunately, in the Big 12 tournament we had a key injury that caused us to lose. We did win one game courageously in the NCAA but lost in the second round. The neat thing about our women's team is that all of them are from Kansas or neighboring states. Our men's team at K-State had a good season, our best in years. We finished third in the conference and beat KU for the first time in years at our place. KU only lost three games all season and one of those was to us. Congratulations to KU for winning the National Championship. It made the state of Kansas and the Big 12 look good. Actually, I grew up watching and being a fan of both KU and K-State and did not become a K-State die-hard until high school, It is hard for most of the people in Kansas to understand why some of the K-State fans hate KU so much, that they can't root for them or even feel good that they won. However when you graduate from K-State or attend school there, you get a blood transfusion and get all that bird blood to come out. You then have purple blood as it is supposed to be. Yes, I rooted for the Jayhawks, but I do understand why many of my blood brothers and sisters won't. You will find this to be true in any state where there are two major colleges. This is especially true if they play each other or are in the same conference. If you didn't attend either school, you just won't get it. So how does all this basketball fit in with the wheat? You have to remember that in the national championship game with Memphis, the Jayhawks were down by 9 points with just a few minutes to play. Yet there can be a lot of basketball to play in just a few minutes. So, a team may trail by a huge margin, early in the game like North Carolina did and come back. That is how it can be with wheat. You sometimes start out slow. Which is what happened to this year's crop. We planted most of the crop fairly late this year because the early planted stuff got hurt worse by freeze and disease the previous year. We also planted some of it even later because as wet as we were in the first half of last year, we were just as dry in the fall. Many farmers waited for the soil to get moist and it never did until December. So the wheat laid in the ground for months. In Barton County, there is an area from around Olmitz to Albert to Pawnee Rock to Great Bend, where the wheat does not look good. The crop is short in height and plant stands are thin. There is still a lot of bare ground showing. This is mostly west of Highway 281. As you go into western Kansas, it continues to get worse. However, the recent rainfall should help all of the wheat. There are some nice looking fields that look like they could really yield good in the areas around Ellinwood, Claflin and Beaver. Yield potential is not going to be very high in the stuff that came up in February, especially if it was only seeded at 60 pounds. In the past, when I have planted wheat in November successfully, we never dropped less than 100 pounds of seed per acre. Many farmers thought it would come up sooner and did not increase seeding rate enough. We had a lot of stress on the crop from the dry fall to the ice storm. Standing water from the heavy December snow caused drown out in low areas. Then we had a fairly cold winter, slowing growth. When we did get some warmer days, it got really cold again, causing the leaves to burn back. The changes in temperature and some moisture caused some cracking of the soil. These weren't necessarily dry weather cracks, more expansion or heaving cracks. Some of the wheat may have been slightly pulled out of the ground and also many plants had roots grow into these cracks where they were more exposed to the cold and thus we had more winter injury. Many fields simply had poor root systems that led to more winter injury. It wasn't so much any record low temperatures as it was just long, steady cold with some fluctuations and plants not covered by snow. So, what will these late plants yield. Well we know tillering is going to be late and that spring tillering is never as good as fall tillering, simply because the heads develop late and are hit sooner by hot weather. We know from experience that hot temperatures, combined with wind do more damage normally than winter cold. I would guess that the poor fields have a maximum yield potential of 30 bushels per acre if we had perfect weather from here on out. That is assuming not much disease loss. Be on the lookout for both fungus and virus diseases. Remember you can spray a fungicide as a protectant and at $8 per bushel wheat I would strongly consider it. I am sure that not only do the Memphis fans dream of what could have been, so does the team and fans from Davidson. They gave KU all they wanted just like Memphis did but just came up a little bit short. With the wheat, we won't win a national championship, but like North Carolina, we could rally and look respectable, but may come up just short. 5/5/08 Date: 5/1/08
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