Winners Of Inaugural National Wheat Yield Contest Share Common Belief

(DTN) -- From central Michigan to the plains of western Kansas and the river-fed acres of northern Oregon, the winners of the inaugural National Wheat Yield Contest share a common belief: Give wheat its due and it will return the favor. "Wheat has always been the forgotten crop," said Rick Horton, who farms dryland wheat, milo and corn in Leoti, Kansas, with his father, two brothers and uncle under Horton Seed Services. "People put it in the ground and walk away and come back in June and cut it. But that's not what it takes to be profitable with wheat now." Horton pushed 33 acres of a winter wheat variety, Joe, developed by the Kansas Wheat Association, to an average yield of 118 bushels per acre (bpa). Nearly 2 acres of that field hit 127.94 bpa, a whopping 374% above his county's five-year average of 27 bpa, which earned him first place in the dryland winter wheat category. The overall yield winner, Phillip Gross of Wardan, Washington, reached 192.85 bpa with an irrigated winter wheat variety from WestBred called Keldin. The numbers are eye-opening, and that's exactly what contest organizers and the farmers who entered hope to do, said Dan Mills, a northern Oregon farmer. He placed first in the irrigated spring wheat category with a WestBred variety called Solano, which yielded 146.5 bpa, 112% above the five-year average yield of Umatilla County, where he farms. "We're just getting to the upper end of what those varieties will yield," he said. "I think in the wheat world, we've been pretty well stuck in the same groove, but the varieties are actually doing so much better." The contest, organized by the National Wheat Foundation, is the first of its kind for wheat growers nationally. The goal is to spur farmer innovation and encourage more intensive crop management in an oft-neglected industry, said Steve Joehl, director of research and technology for the National Association of Wheat Growers. "We really hope to get a technology and information transfer between farmers, aided by the contest," he told DTN. Many wheat growers have long been reluctant to buy new, certified wheat seed each year, when saved seed is available, or put resources into a low-priced crop, he noted. "But farmers need to understand that they've got to drive down cost per bushel by increasing productivity," just as corn and soybean growers do, Joehl said.