Farmers cut their losses early this year across the U.S. wheat belt, stretching from Texas to Montana. They were choosing to bale the wheat into hay, plow their fields under or turn them over to animals to graze. In Nebraska, wheat acreage is less than half of what it was in 2005.

For farmers with crop insurance, damaged or unprofitable wheat fields can still earn revenue. But many agree that chasing insurance payouts is not the best business model.

Wheat farmers reach inflection point

The Great Plains have long been celebrated for the “amber waves of grain” in the popular hymn “America the Beautiful.” The region’s states produce most of the U.S.-grown crop of hard red winter wheat, favored by bakers for bread. But with prices hovering around $5 (C$6.86) per bushel, U.S. wheat farmers have reached an inflection point, with many forced to either lose money, feed wheat to cattle or kill off the crop.

Interviews with more than a dozen farmers and analysts across Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma, along with a review of U.S. Department of Agriculture data, revealed a vast disparity in profit for wheat compared to other crops. This has led farmers to abandon more fields before harvest.

In parts of the region, prolonged drought has lowered yields in recent years. Farm revenue has also suffered in years with healthy rainfall, as abundant global supplies have weighed on prices. Many have pivoted to corn, soy or livestock, often after generations of their family growing wheat exclusively.

“They can’t sustain that,” said Schoenhals, 68, who raises crops and cattle near Kremlin, Oklahoma, and is president of the state’s wheat growers association. “Eventually you either change to other crops if you’re able to, or you go out of business,” he said.

Farmers abandon wheat crops

Two years ago, severe drought drove farmers to abandon about a third of the U.S. crop. This year, healthy green stalks shot through the cracked soil, and farmers had expected to harvest the most bushels per acre since 2016. But wheat prices hit a five-year low in May.

Every year since 2020, farmers have abandoned between a fifth and a third of the winter wheat crop, U.S. Department of Agriculture data show.

Nationwide, corn and soybeans dominate crop fields, with wheat a distant third in planted acreage.

Hard red winter wheat exports hit historic lows in 2024 after drought and lower prices in other wheat-producing areas of the world squeezed the U.S. commodity’s competitiveness.

In Kansas, the leading U.S. producer of hard winter wheat, the disparity between acreage and value is particularly stark. About 1.3 million more farm acres in Kansas were planted with wheat than with corn in 2024, USDA data show, but corn’s value of production was more than twice as high.

Plentiful global supplies have kept benchmark U.S. prices stuck at lows that discourage farmers from growing wheat, producers and analysts told Reuters. Supplies are so ample that droughts in important grain-growing regions of China and Russia this year have barely budged prices.

“We’re below profitable levels for these guys,” said Darin Fessler, an analyst with Lakefront Futures in Lincoln, Nebraska, who grew up on a row crop farm in nearby Sutton.

The way things stand, he said, many farmers have “eaten a lot of their own money and burned up working capital. These bankers are going to say: ‘show me some profits or we’re going to have some farm sales.’”

Heritage but no profit

Ties to wheat farming run deep in the Plains. Historically, European settlers in Kansas struggled to find a foothold until Mennonites from Ukraine arrived with seeds of Turkey Red wheat, a variety that proved able to withstand the area’s dry soil, harsh winters and extreme temperature swings.

The seeds spread to neighboring Oklahoma and Nebraska, where pioneers established homesteads in the sandy, light earth in which wheat thrived but other crops struggled. Hard red winter wheat has remained the main variety of wheat sown in the U.S.

Images of golden stalks adorn hotel lobbies and road signs, and towns include the word in their names. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Willa Cather, a daughter of Red Cloud, Nebraska, wrote a celebrated poem describing “the miles of fresh-plowed soil, heavy and black, full of strength and harshness.”

Now, U.S. wheat growing is on a steady decline, with farmers finding surer profits from corn, soybeans or cattle. On the wheat quality tour in May, weeks before Nebraska wheat is usually harvested, no wheat could be seen for miles around Red Cloud.

When Royce Schaneman joined Nebraska’s wheat board 19 years ago, wheat fields stretched for 2.2 million acres across the state. Since then, acreage has shrunk to less than a million acres, he said. In Cheyenne County in southern Nebraska, the state’s most productive wheat-growing land, about one in five fields was abandoned this year.

“The feeling out in the country is not good,” he said.

Generations of farmers grew wheat because the crop thrived on rainfall alone. In recent decades, farmers have invested in pricey irrigation systems, experimented with hardier varieties and used fertilizer to improve yields.

Agronomists have helped farmers grow more bushels per acre even as climate change has brought more drought and pests. Producers in the southern Plains have experimented with other types of wheat such as durum, the kind used for pasta, and a gluten-free variety, pursuing customers willing to pay more.

Profits remain elusive.

“It’s heritage, but there’s no profit,” said Lon Frahm, the CEO of Frahm Farmland, a 40,000-acre operation in Colby, Kansas. Surrounding Thomas County is now dotted with wind farms. Farmers there once grew wheat exclusively, he said, but they have started to diversify due to more frequent drought and global competition depressing prices.

Frahm himself now mainly plants corn. He irrigates, fertilizes and harvests the grain using multimillion-dollar machines, then stores it in gleaming, 80-foot steel grain bins. His 7,000 acres of wheat sometimes produce just 5 percent of his farm’s total output.

“There’s certainly profit in corn,” he said.

1 acre = 0.405 hectares

Hard Red Winter Wheat (HRWW) July futures tumbled 16 percent between April 18 and May 2. The freefall was due in part to a two-day rain during the last week of April that delivered up to 100 millimetres of moisture to parts of the U.S. Southern Plains.

It was a gross overreaction, according to those closely monitoring the progress of this year’s crop.

“I have no idea why the markets have done what they’ve done,” said Justin Gilpin, chief executive officer of the Kansas Wheat Commission.

The rains in his state fell in southwest Kansas, an area that hadn’t seen any substantive moisture in nearly a year.

“Unfortunately, a lot of that wheat was too far gone,” he said. “It had little impact on that crop.”

The moisture was welcome, but more for the spring crops farmers will be planting to replace their withered winter wheat.

The rain was desperately needed in central Kansas, where the crop at least had a fighting chance, but that didn’t happen and now the crop is looking “pretty stressed” as well, said Gilpin. In fact, crops are struggling across much of the southern Plains region.

He believes final winter wheat production will fall below last year’s 14.45 million tonnes, which was the smallest crop since 1963.

The Oklahoma Grain and Feed Association is forecasting 1.47 million tonnes of production, a 16 percent drop from last year and about half of what would be considered a good crop for that state.

Gilpin doesn’t have a formal estimate for Kansas, which is responsible for nearly half of total U.S. HRWW production.

Farmers in his state planted more acres but abandonment rates will be higher than last year. He believes production will fall below last year’s 6.64 million tonnes.

That is why he finds it so hard to fathom why futures prices are falling.

One possible reason is that even with the recent price drop, U.S. wheat is not even close to being price competitive with Russian and Romanian wheat, according to Egypt’s most recent General Authority for Supply Commodities tender.

Another possible explanation is that wheat is being pulled down by corn, which has been languishing due to forecasts calling for a record Brazilian crop.

Gilpin thinks the HRWW market is being battered by outside factors and fund money flows rather than fundamentals.

“It just feels like the market is oversold and kind of overdone considering the production situation we’re facing in the southern Plains of the United States,” he said.

There is more HRWW rated very poor or poor than there is good to excellent in the U.S.

MarketsFarm analyst Bruce Burnett agrees that the market response has been a bit of a head-scratcher.

“We’re still looking at a very, very small hard red winter crop this year and I don’t think the market has fully grasped that yet,” he said.

“The rains came too late for some of the areas in Texas and Oklahoma that got the bulk of the rain.”

Burnett has spoken to U.S. growers who left him with the distinct impression that a rebound isn’t in the cards.

“One farmer said, ‘just because we got an inch of rain doesn’t mean that (the crop) is going to go from six inches to 12 inches when it’s heading out here,'” he said.

Burnett believes the U.S. HRWW crop will be about the same size as last year, or perhaps even a little smaller, as Gilpin indicated.

That means high protein wheat like that grown in Western Canada will be in short supply once again this year.

Contact sean.pratt@producer.com

The deaths add pain to the U.S. cattle industry as producers have reduced herds due to drought and grappled with feed costs that climbed as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine tightened global grain supplies.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment knew of at least 2,000 cattle deaths due to high temperatures and humidity as of Tuesday, spokesperson Matthew Lara said. The toll represents facilities that contacted the agency for help disposing of carcasses, he said.

Kansas is the third largest U.S. cattle state behind Texas and Nebraska, with more than 2.4 million cattle in feedlots.

Cattle began suffering heat stress as temperatures and humidity spiked over the weekend in western Kansas and cooling winds disappeared, said Scarlett Hagins, spokesperson for the Kansas Livestock Association. The animals could not acclimate to the sudden change, she said.

“It was essentially a perfect storm,” said AJ Tarpoff, beef extension veterinarian for Kansas State University.

Temperatures reached 108 degrees Fahrenheit (42 degrees Celsius) in northwest Kansas by Monday, said Drew Lerner, president of World Weather Inc. This weekend, parts of western Kansas and the Texas panhandle will near 110 degrees, though stronger winds and lower humidity levels will help minimize cattle deaths, he said.

“It’s going to be oppressively hot and stressful for the animals,” Lerner said.

To survive, ranchers are providing cattle with extra water and checking their health.

“You can’t say, ‘Oh I checked them three days ago,'” said Brenda Masek, president of the industry association Nebraska Cattlemen. “When it gets hot, you’ve got be to out every day and making sure that their water is maintained.”