Serving Whitman County since 1877

‘Promising’ harvest starts out west

Combines began cutting Whitman County wheat fields out west this week, bringing in a long-delayed crop that could make a lot of farmers very happy.

“It looks promising. This could be a good crop,” Tom Cauley at Ritzville Warehouse’s LaCrosse plant said Tuesday.

Cauley began unloading trucks from wheat fields south of LaCrosse in earnest Monday, about two weeks later than usual.

Harvest has been delayed by this year’s record soggy spring.

In the eastern part of Whitman County, Ben Barstow, president of the Washington Association of Wheat Growers, said he is running at least two weeks behind schedule on ground he farms around Colfax and Palouse.

“I will probably be threshing in September. That’s what I expect,” said Barstow.

Barstow said he is even putting off preparing his combine for harvest to take a pre-harvest family vacation.

“Usually I’d be firing up next Monday - around the first of August,” said Barstow.

According to the weekly crop report issued by the National Agricultural Statistics Service, harvest has begun on only one percent of Washington state’s wheat crops.

Linda Simpson, member of the NASS staff, said they expect the 1.8 million acres of wheat planted across the state to yield averages of 69 bushels per acre for winter wheat and 50 bushels per acre for spring wheat.

Those averages would produce 120.8 million bushels of winter wheat, a two percent increase over 2010, and 31.8 million bushels of spring wheat, a six percent increase over last year.

Simpson noted those figures were based on July 1 conditions. The weather since has been beneficial, she said.

July’s up-and-down weather patterns of heat followed by a couple of cooler days has been beneficial to crops. Barstow and Simpson both said this year’s crop should provide yields well above average.

“If you’d of asked me how they looked even two and a half weeks ago, I would have said I was expecting average or a little less,” said Barstow. “But things look a lot better than I would have ever expected them to.”

The heat of July also appears to have stopped development of the stripe rust fungus that was prevalent in Palouse wheat fields this year.

Stripe rust is a fungus that attacks chaff, leaves and leaf sheath of the plants. Infection kills the leaves of a plant, thus reducing its ability to produce nutrients needed for kernel development. That hits hard by lowering the weight of kernels at harvest time.

Rust can cause yield loss as much as 40 percent in wheat and barley.

Rust spores were leftover in fields from a heavy infestation last year.

Many farmers had to make more than one application of fungicide to combat the rust infection, efforts that Barstow said appear to have worked.

“I think the damage won’t be that big this year,” he said. “By and large, I think we’re pretty much out of the woods.”

 

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