Kansas Loses 25% of Wheat to Drought

Spring is bringing bad news to farmers in the heart of America’s breadbasket.

In Kansas, the nation’s major producer of bread-making hard red winter wheat, at least 25% of the 1989 crop--enough wheat to meet American demand for one month--already appears to be lost to a continuation of last summer’s devastating drought.

Plants’ Growth Retarded

Half of the state of Kansas is dry. Tumbleweeds, the color of desert sand and the size of large dogs, blow across fields of green and yellowing wheat plants retarded in their growth by a lack of moisture. Winds whip up billows of dust that roll toward the horizon like dark clouds hugging the ground. Some river and creek beds have been dry for so long that weeds are sprouting under the spring sun.

This is a time in the growing season when wheat fields should be a lush green and thick like a suburban lawn. Instead most fields are filled with narrow rows of immature plants separated by wider rows of topsoil. Some fields are barren and in others, lonely clumps of green stick up from the dry, gray earth.

“This crop is two to three weeks behind where it should be right now,” farmer Gary Antenen, 57, said, standing in one of his fields south of Ness City, Kan. And when Antenen pulled an apparently healthy wheat plant from the ground he was surprised to find underdeveloped roots. “They should be at least this long,” he said holding one hand several inches from the plant.

Winter wheat fields in Oklahoma, Nebraska, Colorado and West Texas are also suffering from below normal rain. Harvests could be off by 15% or more. In the Northwest, a large portion of the winter wheat crop is also in poor condition, damaged by a severe, wet winter.

Bread Prices May Rise

Consumers could feel the effects of a persistent drought later this year. If the dry weather continues, bread prices could jump as much as 10%, said Tom Roberts, executive vice president of the Kansas-based Wheat Quality Council.

The potential losses are coming at a time when world wheat reserves are at worrisome low levels. “Wheat stocks are as tight as they’ve ever been,” said Edward Allen, an Agriculture Department grain analyst.

U.S. wheat stockpiles are expected to drop to about 534 million bushels by June 1, less than a third of what they were two years ago. A short harvest could force the government to either curtail exports or to continue to dip into the nation’s shrinking grain reserves.

Of the surviving Kansas winter wheat crop, 70% was in poor to very poor condition last week, the Agriculture Department reported, while subsoil moisture necessary to sustain crops was inadequate in 77% of the state’s fields. The state typically supplies 35% of the nation’s winter wheat, more than 17% of the country’s entire wheat supply and 11% of the world’s crop.

Concern is also mounting over the impact continuing drought will have on the winter wheat that will be planted next September for harvesting in 1990.

“We’re in real trouble,” said Antenen, who farms more than 7,000 acres with his father and brother. “If we don’t get any more rainfall, we’ve pretty well had the course.”

“This is the worst crop I’ve seen come on,” said Joe Martin, a wheat researcher with 25 years’ experience in central Kansas.

Washington Crop Poor

In the state of Washington--the nation’s top producer of white winter wheat used in noodles and popular in Asian markets--60% of the crop was in poor to very poor condition last week, the Agriculture Department reported.

The drought is also triggering record soil erosion across the high plains. In Kansas alone, topsoil has blown off of 4.77 million acres of land this year and crops on 600,000 acres have been destroyed by erosion--one of the state’s worst single season losses since the Dust Bowl.

“It is the driest spell we remember,” said Darrel E. Wark, 51, a Colby, Kan., farmer. “The fields are so fragile, so dry, that any breeze just sets off the dust.”

The worst dust storm in more than a decade darkened Kansas two weeks ago, sending a cloud of dust that reached Illinois and Indiana. Two people died in auto accidents and dozens more were hurt when visibility dropped to zero in much of the western half of the state.

“We were in the field and couldn’t see more than a few feet,” said Wark who, like many other farmers, is preparing to abandon some of the fields he planted last autumn because wheat either did not germinate or died because of drought and a winter of dramatic temperature variations.

“Unless we receive additional moisture through April and May, we’re going to see more dust blowing,” said Tim Christian, a spokesman for the federal government’s Soil Conservation Service.

At the Kansas State University agricultural experiment station here at Hays, there has been less than an inch of rainfall since the beginning of the year, two inches below normal. Only 14.3 inches fell all of last year, most of that before May 1, slightly more than half the rain the station recorded in 1987.

Prepares Aid Bill

Last week Congress, pushed by House members from winter wheat producing states, began preparing disaster relief legislation for wheat farmers. A House Agriculture subcommittee drew up an aid package despite warnings from Agriculture Department officials--who have a history of minimizing farm problems--that it was too early to declare this year’s crop a catastrophe. Winter wheat farmers were not included in last year’s $3.9-billion drought relief legislation because the crop, already well along in 1988, was not seriously affected when the hot, dry weather settled on the nation’s midsection.

“It’s a little premature to begin writing (this year’s) crop down to a specific level,” cautioned Norton Strommen, the department’s chief meteorologist. “We’re looking at a very different weather pattern this year than we were looking at last year.”

“If we get rain in the next two weeks it will help in southern Kansas,” said Mike Smith, of WeatherData, consultants to The Times. “But in some areas around Great Bend, Hays, Ellsworth and Russell I don’t think any rain will help significantly. Much of the wheat there is dead.”

Significant rain is not expected across Kansas and other portions of the Wheat Belt until later this week. Weather experts are predicting below-normal rainfall in the immediate future with near-normal rains later in the spring.

Normal rains later in the spring would provide some help to this year’s winter wheat crops and would help to mitigate the concern about moisture conditions for the 1990 crop.

Even in the best of times, rainfall is sparse across much of the winter Wheat Belt. Farmers leave half of their land fallow each year to store up moisture for the next crop. Normally fields that are fallow now would be absorbing spring rains and storing that moisture in the subsoil to nurture the crop to be planted next September.

“We’ve probably stored up no subsoil moisture for next year’s crop,” said Martin, a wheat breeder at Kansas State University’s Ft. Hays experiment station.

Drought conditions are also still evident in portions of the Corn Belt from northwestern Illinois into Iowa and down to northern Missouri where farmers are beginning to prepare their fields to plant next fall’s corn and soybean crops.

Rain Will Be Too Late

Spring rains, if they come, will help Midwest farmers but for much of the Wheat Belt, the rain will be too late.

Planted in September, winter wheat normally benefits from a blanket of snow that protects the young plants from arctic winds and sharp temperature variations. But last winter there was virtually no snow. The young, unprotected plants--many with underdeveloped roots because of drought--were shocked by a sudden change from record warmth in January when temperatures on the high plains reached the 70s and 80s to record cold during the first days of February when temperatures plunged well below zero. Plants died of winterkill.

Melting snow and spring rains also provide moisture to help the plants rebound from winter and begin their rapid growth toward harvest time late in June or early in July. This year there was no melting snow and only marginal spring rains.

Great Plains Drought Winter wheat harvests are threatened, and prices for bread could jump 10%