Parched Midwest Reaps a Shriveled Summer Harvest

Roaring combines are stirring giant dust clouds over sweltering Kansas wheat fields as the first harvest of 1988 in the nation’s heartland--and maybe one of the few in this drought-parched year--pushes north across the high plains.

Here in western Kansas on Monday, the winter wheat was golden yellow, prematurely ripened by unusually hot temperatures that have speeded the harvest by weeks in some areas.

So far, heat and wind, insects and disease--not drought--have been the Kansas wheat farmer’s enemy in this summer of extraordinary weather.

It was so hot for so long that by mid-June “you’d get up in the morning and you could smell the wheat cooking in the fields,” recalled Peter Zerr, who farms near Grinnell.

A week of powerful, hot winds early in June and 100-degree heat that continues to bake the plains sucked moisture from young wheat kernels, shriveling them the same way an apple shrivels when it is dried.

“When you get those hot winds before the berry (kernel) is completed it just burns it up,” said Lloyd White, a Levant, Kan., farmer.

“Last year 100 kernels would fill your hand,” said Zerr. “This year 100 kernels is just a thimbleful.”

The size of the 1988 crop also is affected by infestations of Russian wheat aphids and wheat streak mosaic, a virus carried by a microscopic mite.

The smaller wheat kernels cut sharply into harvest yields here in west central Kansas, the buckle of the American wheat belt. For example, Zerr estimates that his wheat crop will be only half of his normal 40-bushels-an-acre harvest.

“This is the worst I’ve seen it in 20 some years,” said Ed Dunn, manager of the Co-Op Grain Elevator in Colby, Kan.

The below average Kansas harvest, along with other drought-destroyed and -damaged spring and winter wheat on the plains, could drive U.S. wheat reserves to their lowest level in 15 years while pushing up wheat prices and eventually consumer prices. Here in western Kansas, farmers are selling their smaller wheat harvest for $3.50 a bushel, up from $1.20 about a year ago.

Worse to the North

And the fear is that the harvest will continue to deteriorate to the north where heat, wind and drought have sharply reduced wheat, oats and barley crops in the Dakotas, Montana and Minnesota.

For example, Montana reported on Monday that 72% of its spring wheat crop, 64% of its winter wheat and 60% of its barley crops are in poor to very poor condition with harvest still weeks away.

In North Dakota it is estimated that 70% of its small grain crops already have been lost, the worst loss reported by any state so far.

“Once we get beyond Elsie, Neb., there isn’t going to be much to harvest,” said Mike Matejcek, who runs one of the scores of combining crews--mechanical migrants--who follow the harvest across the high and northern plains. West central Kansas is usually the midway point in their harvest circuit. This year it may be near the end. Elsie is in southwest Nebraska, about 200 miles north of here.

“But it’s not going to hurt us as much as it will hurt the farmers,” said Matejcek, of Wahpeton, N. D.

If not a bumper harvest, it is not one of despair.

“I feel we have been lucky when you hear what is going on all over the country,” said White, 62. “I remember years in the 1930s when we didn’t raise anything.”

“Wheat is not hurting as much as corn and soybeans this year,” said Barry Jenkins, director of communications for the National Assn. of Wheat Growers.

“You measure your success in terms of how you did in view of the other forces you have no control over, like weather,” said Kenneth Frahm, 42, who farms and manages 10,000 acres spread over a 65-mile-long stretch of west central Kansas.

If the lack of water did not affect the wheat, it is affecting other crops that are grown in this rugged, semi-arid region where annual rainfall is a third to a quarter of what it is farther east where corn and soybeans are the most common crops.

The region around Zerr’s farm, for example, has received only 42% of its normal rainfall so far this year. That, coupled with the heat, is worrisome.

“Wheat is a disappointment but corn and milo will be bad,” said Zerr, who also grows milo or sorghum, a corn-like grain used for animal feed.

Like Beach Sand

“Feel that soil,” said Zerr, digging into the hot, powdery earth where he planted sorghum a few weeks ago. “You wouldn’t want to grow in that ground. It’s way too hot,” he said, letting the earth--as hot as beach sand in August--fall from his fingers.

Only part of his sorghum crop and those of his neighbors have germinated. “The dang heat,” said Zerr. “If we could get some 50-degree temperatures for just one day! Farming has so many perils but climate is 99% of it.”

Researchers Rhonda Bergman and Ruth Lopez contributed to this story from Chicago.