Western Kansas Drought Takes Toll

From Morning Edition:

ERIC DURBIN: There are parts of the Midwest that have received more rain in a single day than huge tracts of Kansas have seen since last fall. That's when farmers here planted hard red winter wheat. That's the wheat primarily used for making bread. The drought covers significant portions of Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma.

The Wheat Quality Council's annual wheat tour recently cataloged the crop and estimated a harvest almost 30 percent less than last year.

Farmer Jason Ochs walks through a field of yellowish-green wheat stalks almost two-feet tall. While in the field, Ochs gets word of another Hamilton County farmer whose fields were appraised at only three bushels per acre, 27 bushels below the county average.

Mr. JASON OCHS (Farmer): They won't even take that to harvest at that point in time. They'll tear it up and start conserving moisture for the next crop, as far as that goes. I've seen - or heard of several thousand acres where that's happened.

DURBAN: Dean Stoskopf is a former Kansas Wheat Commissioner. He says weather patterns over the next several weeks could potentially swing harvesting totals here by as much as 50 million bushels either way. But even if it rains now, farmers will still see low yields, and Stoskopf says that will show up in the price of bread, although not as much as you might expect.

Mr. DEAN STOSKOPF (Former Kansas Wheat Commissioner): The fluctuation from actually the amount of wheat that goes into a loaf of bread doesn't change a whole lot. We could have a really reduced crop, and from the wheat side of that, maybe a couple cents a loaf of - for bread.

3 bushel per acre.  That would be two semi loads from a full (640 acre) section.  That is very hard to imagine.