2018 Wheat ACREAGE

Wheat farmers will head into 2018 at the bottom of a three-decades-long slide in U.S. wheat acres. "It's not unusual to see ups and downs in wheat acreage. "But what is unusual is this long, sustained downward trend. What makes it unique is we've been losing about 800,000 wheat acres a year, for about 35 years." The slide became a cliff in the past two years, when U.S. farmers pulled wheat off nearly 9 million acres between 2015 and 2017. This year's planted wheat acreage of 46 million acres is the lowest in recorded U.S. history. Huge drops like those between 2015 and 2017 -- when wheat lost more than 4 million acres each year -- are unlikely. Why? The alternative crops of corn and soybeans simply aren't that attractive, in part because their acres have swelled as wheat has declined. "If you're dumping nearly 9 million acres of wheat, those acres are going somewhere; farmers didn't idle them To add to the over-production problem, 13 million acres have left the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) since 2007, most heavily from states like Montana, North Dakota, Texas and Kansas. Currently, the CRP cap sits at 24 million acres, an all-time low in the program's 30-year history. As Congress takes on the 2018 farm bill, it will face important questions about whether to increase, maintain or lower that cap,