POTTER, Neb. (AP) - A lush carpet of short green sprouts covers Rick Larson’s wheat fields in the Nebraska Panhandle near Potter.
The plants look good, Larson said, although the mild winter caused it to break dormancy early this year putting it in danger of being damaged by a hard early spring frost.
Wheat farmers’ financial books, however, don’t look quite so good.
“We’re not breaking even at all,” the third-generation wheat farmer said.
That dismal financial outlook has accelerated the decline of wheat acres being planted in Nebraska, where it has long been a staple of dryland rotations.
The state’s farmers will grow fewer acres this year than ever before, the Lincoln Journal Star (https://bit.ly/2nK5bZ6 ) reported. They planted 1.09 million acres of hard red winter wheat last fall to harvest in 2017, 20 percent less than the year prior and about half what got planted a decade ago for harvest in 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service.
“Right now, the cost of wheat production is higher than the price per bushel,” Caroline Brauer of the Nebraska Wheat Board said in a recent interview.
Farmers in some areas of Nebraska, Brauer added, would lose a dollar a bushel if they planted wheat this year.
“From a business standpoint, it’s just not sustainable to plant that. It’s not a viable option,” she said. “Farmers had to make a decision in some instances that led to saying it’s not economically viable to plant a wheat crop on some acres this year.”
In the Nebraska Panhandle, the going price for a bushel of wheat and corn is about the same, around $3.50, Larson said. While corn produces bigger yields, it’s not as reliable a crop on dryland that sees only 15 inches of precipitation on average a year, he said.
About half the wheat grown in the United States gets exported. World supplies of the grain, which saw a bin-busting harvest last year, are abundant and a strong U.S. dollar has made wheat grown here more expensive on the world market. U.S. wheat stocks were 2.07 billion bushels as of Dec. 1, up 19 percent from the year prior, according to the USDA.
Farmers have been sowing fewer wheat seeds nationally as well. The USDA estimated 36.6 million acres of winter wheat got planted last fall, down 7 percent from the year prior.
The decrease in wheat planted in Nebraska has been happening for much longer than can be blamed on current financial woes.
Corn and soybeans, generally the better yield-price combination, have been encroaching on wheat acres for decades; current finances simply hastened the process.
Advances in science, genetics and breeding have made corn and soybean suited to growing in a wide range of regions, made them more pest resistant and led to explosive growth of yields, which means more kernels or beans per acre.
“Areas that used to be only wheat now can support newer varieties of dryland corn or soybean and yield where they wouldn’t have before,” Brauer said.
Wheat research hasn’t kept pace. While wheat yields have trended up, they have not increased anywhere near as dramatically as corn yields. Nebraska wheat fields yielded an average of 42 bushels an acre in 1971 and 54 bushels in 2016, an exceptionally good year. Meanwhile, dryland corn fields went from an average of 60.6 bushels an acre in 1971 to 147.2 bushels in 2016.
Mark Knobel, who works fields north of Fairbury, is one of the farmers still working wheat into his crop rotation.
“You analyze your situation every year, but I don’t want to mess up my rotation. Wheat does positive things overall for your ground from a conservation standpoint, and soil tilth and soil health. I have some highly erodible ground and it fits my rotation quite nicely,” Knobel said.
Wheat typically ripens by the end of June, ahead of hot, dry conditions; and gets used as ground cover to prevent runoff from gully-washers, as well as helps control pests and plant diseases when used in rotation.
Knobel, who grows wheat to sell for seed, said he generally plants a rotation of corn and soybeans followed by wheat and sunflowers in a single year, made possible by the early wheat harvest.
“The double cropping makes it a little more palatable,” he said. “You have to maintain profitability to stay in business.”
Despite its benefits, wheat’s unlikely to see resurgence in Nebraska without a major turnaround in price or the development with better yields, said Paul Hay, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln extension educator based in Beatrice.
“We really need these crops to stand on their own merit. If we’re going to raise wheat, we either need to find a way to produce more per acre or get the price up to where we it can be competitive against other crops,” he said.
Often, he said, the decision of whether to plant wheat hinged on whether the producer owned land outright or had to pay loans or rent, which adds more red ink in the costs column of the ledger.
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Information from: Lincoln Journal Star, https://www.journalstar.com
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