By MIKE CORN

mcorn@dailynews.net

When the numbers came in, Eddie Wells knew they had to be double checked.

After all, losing 600,000 acres of wheat -- the equivalent of all the wheat fields in Ellis, Rooks, Rush, Russell, Trego and Gove counties -- was significant.

For the 2009 crop, Kansas farmers planted 9 million acres of wheat last fall, according to a report issued today by Kansas Agricultural Statistics Service, a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That's down 600,000 from last year -- 1.4 million since the 2007 crop.

"That's the lowest number of acres since 1957, when drought forced 41âÑ2 million acres into a soil-bank reserve," said Eddie Wells, deputy director of KASS.

For Wells, the precipitous decline came as a surprise.

"We were looking for another decline," he said, "but this is not what we expected."

The sheer number of wheat acres being grown in Kansas has been dropping, much of it a result of higher prices in other crops, such as corn or soybeans.

That's exactly where Wells is expecting the lost acres to be found, when his agency conducts a planting-intentions report in March. That's when farmers will be surveyed to determine what fall crops they expect to plant.

But it's safe to say the wheat acres that remain idle won't stay that way long.

Wells said the north-central crop-reporting district alone reflected a drop in land dedicated to wheat amounting to 150,000 acres. That's an 11 percent drop, he said, all of it coming from an area that has, for the most part, been flush with rain in late summer and early fall.

Southeast Kansas, Wells said, dropped 80,000 wheat acres.

That part of the state, with sharply higher rainfall amounts, is quick to make the switch to either corn or soybeans.

The western third of the state, Wells said, was down slightly.

Sharon Springs farmer David Schemm, vice president of the trade group Kansas Wheat, said he thinks a late fall harvest is responsible for some of the decline in that area of the state.

There, he said, farmers were cutting corn late into the fall. That's a problem, he said, on irrigated land, where farmers turn right back around and plant wheat on the same ground.

"We're down on our acres, I'd say," Schemm said of the wheat crop in his area.

Wells said the west-central crop reporting district, which includes Wallace County, was down by about 40,000 acres. The northwest district was down 20,000 acres. The central crop reporting district, which includes Ellis County, was down 55,000 acres, only 5 percent.

Schemm said anywhere from 30 percent to 50 percent of the farmers in his area were struggling to get corn off the field and be able to get back in to plant a wheat crop.

"Guys work with a very tight time frame," he said.

For Wells, the surprise came in how many acres dropped from the planting rotation, "especially with how strong wheat prices have been and how well wheat grows in Kansas."

But, he said, farmers making the switch from wheat to another crop already are growing corn and soybeans.