CHICAGO, May 1 (Reuters) – The U.S. southern Plains wheat belt remains dry and a weekend heatwave will add stress to the maturing wheat crop as conditions continue to deteriorate, forecasters said on Thursday.
Temperatures are expected to climb into the 90s Fahrenheit (32 Celsius) this weekend with the heat continuing into Wednesday for the driest spots of the southern Plains hard red winter wheat region, including central and southwest Kansas, southeast Colorado, western Oklahoma and western Texas.
“If this plays out you’re going see some pretty significant yield impacts in the driest section of the belt,” said Joel Widenor, a senior meteorologist with Commodity Weather Group. “This is bad timing for those areas to be seeing this kind of weather.”
Read Also
Alberta crop conditions improve: report
Varied precipitation and warm temperatures were generally beneficial for crop development across Alberta during the week ended July 8, according to the latest provincial crop report released July 11.
More than half of the crop in Oklahoma and Texas – the top HRW wheat states behind No. 1 Kansas – has reached the critical heading stage of development when moisture needs increase.
The weekly U.S. Drought Monitor (http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/), issued by state and federal climate experts, on Thursday said drought expanded across the southern Plains. In the top wheat state of Kansas, for instance, the entire state is in drought, with 24.68 percent in extreme to exceptional drought compared to 19.64 percent the week before.
“Bands of 2-4 inches of rain fell across parts of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas this week, but the western portions of Nebraska and Kansas largely missed out on the precipitation. The precipitation from this week’s slow-moving upper low replenished topsoil moisture, but subsoil moisture was slow to respond, limiting any improvement,” the drought report said.
“Going forward they’ve got one chance of getting rain in the next two weeks – Wednesday-Thursday in the central Plains and Friday-Saturday in the southern Plains next week,” Widenor said. “The problem is it looks like most of the forecasting models are skipping over the areas that are the core dry spots.”
Scouts on the annual hard red winter wheat crop tour, which is inspecting Kansas wheat fields this week to gauge yield potential, said the dryness is taking a toll on crops with yield estimates coming in behind a year ago and the five-year average.
“It’s going to be mid-90s for five of the next seven days. That’s going to cook it. There will be less wheat than what we are seeing this week,” said Ben Handcock, executive vice president of the Wheat Quality Council, the organizer of the Kansas wheat tour.
“The heat is going to make smaller and lighter kernels. The test weight won’t be 60 lbs,” he added.
