Plains Drought Intensifies

It was an uncommon site in my hometown of Dighton, Kan., this week. If you had lunch in our local diner, you had to wait to get a table and the parking lot outside was jammed.

If this were summer, you'd have thought we were in the middle of harvest. But it wasn't harvest crews that had descended on the area. We were inundated with crop insurance adjusters.

The wheat crop here is among the worst in the state and keeps getting worse.

USDA on Monday put the Kansas wheat crop at 42% poor-to-very-poor, up from 37% the previous week.

Here in the west-central part of the state, you get the feeling things are actually much worse. The fields in eastern Kansas are not nearly as bad, our crop adjuster told me as we were assessing our fields. The worst wheat, he noted, was here in western Kansas where intense drought has persisted for the past several months.

Insurance appraisals of 1.5 to 3 bu/acre on drought-stricken fields are not uncommon. The worst field on our farm was appraised at 2.2 bus/acre and will be entirely abandoned. Much of that field was assessed at zero as there simply wasn't any wheat to inspect.

Dismal prospects

Driving around the county, you quickly see how so many fields have such dismal prospects. Rather than seeing lush, green fields of wheat that normally carpet the countryside this time of year, many fields instead look like the surface of Mars. At this point in the season, it's just too late for those fields to have any serious hope of making it to harvest even if it did start to rain this spring.

Current crop conditions for the state are in the top three worst years with abandonment rates expected to be very high. A look at our crop ratings shows that when our poor-to-very-poor ratings in mid-April exceeded 40% for the state, our abandonment rate surpassed 17%. That's about twice the historical abandonment rate of 9.8%. In our very worst year, 1988, we had a poor-to-very-poor rating of 78% with 28% of all wheat acres abandoned. In our most similar year, 2006, our poor-to-very-poor rating was 41% with 17% of all acres abandoned.

If history is any indication of where this drought has led us, 17-18% of all wheat acres in Kansas could be plowed up this spring. Most of those acres will be out west. Here on our farm, we are expecting to abandon at least 15% of the acres we planted to wheat last fall.

As for the acres we think will make it to harvest, we're expecting about a 40 bu/acre average. That's not by any means a terrible yield, but it's a far cry from last year when we had a farm average of nearly twice that. And, that's based on the assumption we'll start getting some rain. The current outlook for this summer, though, isn't promising.

On the bright side, as our neighbor says, making an insurance claim could pay better than harvest this year. You don't have to pay a fuel bill