A cold snap early last month has taken its toll on Cowley County wheat farmers with many losing between 25 and 50 percent of their crop, a county official says.
“We have some producers that won’t put a combine in the field,” Jeremy Nelson, extension agent for Cowley County, said. “It will have a definite economic impact.”
Nelson says his office and the Cowley County Farm Service Agency assessed the impact of the April freeze for a report produced by the FSA. The snap put temperatures below freezing during the first week of April at a time when vegetation, including wheat, was just beginning to mature.
Areas north and east of Winfield were the hardest hit locally. In some instances entire fields were lost and some producers reported a total loss of their crop, Nelson said. The earlier the wheat was planted, the more poorly it tended to fare, he said.
Few producers countywide escaped unscathed and the 25 to 50 percent range of loss would include “most producers,” Nelson said.
Nelson could not put a dollar amount on the damage and said it is too early to assess the overall quality of the wheat that survived.
An FSA official was out of the office late Tuesday and not immediately available for comment. A weekly report produced by the United States Department of Agriculture indicates that condition ratings for Kansas wheat fell after the freeze but have improved slightly since then.
And there is good news, according to Nelson and the USDA. Yield average and overall production are expected to be up this year and wheat prices are estimated to be between $4.35 and $4.95 per bushel.
That price is well above last year’s, which means those that do harvest wheat should do well.
“Of course when you’re looking at losing 50 percent of what you could have had,” Nelson said. “It can be disappointing.”
Alfalfa growers were also hurt by the colder-than-normal weather. The freeze came along at a time when alfalfa is usually a month or so away from its first cut.
“The frost just wiped it out,” Nelson said. “We usually cut it four times, now we’ll be doing good to get three.”
