Kansas harvest scorched, soaked amid climate fears
Horrid conditions limit hopes for good crop to offset Ukraine losses
This single field, just 160 acres of Kansas dirt, tells the story of a torturous wheat season.
One side is a drought-scorched graveyard for grain that never made it to harvest.
Near the center, combines plod through chest-high weeds and underwhelming patches of beige wheat, just enough of it to make a harvest worthwhile.
And over by the tree line, the most tantalizing wheat beckons like a desert mirage. The grain there is flourishing, the beneficiary of a late-season shift from dry to drenching. But it will never be collected: The ground is too waterlogged to support the weight of harvesting equipment.
“It really doesn’t get any crazier than right here, right now,” the farmer of that land, Jason Ochs, said last week as he salvaged what he could from the field.
At a time when the global grain market has been scrambled by a war between two major wheat producers, Ukraine and Russia, farmers in Kansas are bringing in the state’s smallest wheat crop in more than half a century.
The main culprit is the extreme drought that, as recently as late April, had ensnared almost the entire western half of the state and forced many farmers to abandon their crops. More recently, intense rain has eased the drought, but it came too late for much of Kansas’ winter wheat, which was planted in the fall for harvest in late spring and early summer.
The dueling weather extremes have confounded farmers and raised long-term climate questions about the future of the Great Plains wheat crop.
On the Plains, “precipitation and temperature are projected to trend in opposite directions in the future,” said Xiaomao Lin, the state climatologist and a professor at Kansas State University. “Specifically, temperatures are expected to rise while rainfall decreases. Both of these changes are detrimental to wheat crops.” A study Lin co-wrote last year in the journal Nature Communications linked yield loss in Great Plains winter wheat since the 1980s to periods of intense heat, stiff winds and little moisture, hallmarks of climate change.
Lin said the early part of the 2022-23 wheat-growing season was the driest on the Plains in 128 years — even drier than during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s — though he cautioned it was too soon to say precisely what role climate change played in this year’s particular conditions.
The importance of the Plains wheat crop has only become clearer over the past year, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine created uncertainty around the global supply of the staple crop, a major source of nutrition in developing countries.
On the Plains, the war has made for volatile commodity prices, fast-changing market conditions and, among some farmers, a sense that their work matters more than before. But some farmers’ wheat is so scraggly that it is not worth harvesting, leaving them to rely on crop insurance.
The later rain was a boon for crops that were planted in the spring, like corn and grain sorghum, and in some places it gave a last-minute boost to the wheat. But the showers forced weeks of delays in the wheat harvest and left some soil so soggy that no crop could be collected on it.
“For me, it’s mind-boggling,” said Ochs, adding though his winter wheat withered, his spring crops were as strong as any he had ever grown. “I talked to what I call old-timers and they’re the same way — they’ve never seen anything like this.”