© 2021
In touch with the world ... at home on the High Plains
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Wheat ‘a dead man walking’ type crop?

Louise Ehmke

The grain traders in Chicago are thinking that the damage to the Kansas wheat crop from the late-season blizzard and freezing temperatures …is only modest. After all, it’s standing up now and field after field looks like it has 70-bushel yield potential. But Jim Shroyer says, “They may have a bad surprise waiting for them.”

After a trip through west-central and southwest Kansas on May 9, Shroyer, K-State Extension wheat specialist emeritus, says much of the wheat he looked at does look great.

“But if you walk out into the fields and pull back the canopy, you’re looking at some severely damaged stems near the soil surface,” Shroyer said. “And even though the plant appears to be growing normally and some heads are coming out, it might be a question of time. This could be a dead man walking crop.”

Jim says when you’re in the field, you immediately notice that you are walking on a blanket of stems – not the soil. He explains that the heavy snows from a blizzard at the end of April pulled the wheat to the ground. Much of this area got 15 to 20 inches of heavy wet snow driven by howling 55 mph winds.

But within just a few days, the plant quickly developed an auxin-related response to right itself. Auxins are growth hormones which the plant relied on to start bending upwards at nodes. The plant is not really standing upright, but is correcting itself. In the field I noticed several nodes were bending so that the head could appear upright. Jim says this is fine. The bends at the nodes are what we want to happen.

“However, if you look at the lower part of the stem below the bent nodes, that’s where you might find the real problem,” he said. “If you’re finding kinks or split stems, you may be simply living on borrowed time.”

Jim also observed that the better fields with the higher yield potentials seem to have been hit a lot harder than fields with thinner stands. He also observed that western Scott County, for instance, is a lot worse off than western Lane County or eastern Scott County. “I have no idea why that is,” he said.

So where are we headed? Jim says he doesn’t want to sound like a waffling politician.

“But honestly we could see things happening all over the board. A lot of it depends on the weather. If we have cool and wet weather, a lot of these fields will produce something,” he said. “With the right conditions, a field with a 70-bushel yield potential before the storm probably won’t be able to do that now. And, in fact, with the wrong kind of weather, we could see a 90 percent yield loss.”

Jim also points out that as the plant heads, demands for moisture sharply increase.

“Our peak water demands are starting right now. Over the next 15 to 18 days water use will continue to climb. With cool and wet weather, even though damaged by a stem kink, the plant will hopefully be able to keep up with evapo-transpiration needs,” he said. “But if it can’t, it could die suddenly and prematurely.”

Jim is also concerned that these injured plants will end up producing a lot of small, low test weight kernels.

“And a lot of those will go right out the back of the combine and contribute to the start of another severe problem with wheat streak mosaic for next year like we’ve seen this year in western Kansas,” he said.

In fact, Jim says in some areas like Lane County, the wheat streak mosaic virus epidemic is the biggest problem those farmers have to deal with.

“That along with damage to the plant stems from the blizzard could certainly reduce yields into the 30s or even 20-bushel yield range,” he said.

All this brings us to another problem that farmers will have to face in the very near future. How much more money do we invest in a crop with a very uncertain future? Personally I’d say the odds are very high that we’ll develop problems with stripe rust or leaf rust. Conventionally it has been said that you should not invest in foliar fungicides if you didn’t have at least a 40-bushel yield potential. But with cheaper and very effective generic materials, pathologists have been comfortable with reducing the yield threshold to 20 bushels per acre. But that also assumed we had at least breakeven prices – which we absolutely don’t.

Or do we walk into what is termed the self-validating assumption. We assume we’ll lose the crop or lose money on it so we start doing things that will ensure we lose the crop or lose money on it – like not using a foliar fungicide. Jim’s best advice on this point is to go slow so we have a little better idea on where the crop is headed before spending any more money on it.

Bottom line: regardless of the comfort level in Chicago, Jim says we have a very serious potential problem with the central high plains wheat crop.

“Everything is not just fine out here,” he said.