Wheat Quality Council's HRW Wheat Tour Estimate Increases

The first day of the Wheat Quality Council's Hard Red Winter (HRW) Wheat Tour wrapped up with a total weighted average yield estimate of 46.9 bushels per acre (bpa), up from 38.2 bpa last year. The tour made 240 stops to measure wheat, most of them a muddy affair, as showers and thunderstorms pelted many of the tour's routes through central and northern Kansas, as well as the southernmost counties of Nebraska. That moisture has been a game changer for the quality and yield potential of this year's winter wheat crop, noted Doug Bounds, the Kansas state statistician for USDA NASS. "Last year roughly 97% of the state was in some state of drought at this time," he said. "Now zero percent of the state is in a drought. So we have drastically different conditions this year."