'Miracle crop' still showing strong results
Published on -7/1/2009, 12:49 PM
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By MIKE CORN
WaKEENEY -- With a pile of hundreds of thousands of bushels of wheat in the foreground, Glennis Billinger could only marvel that he was standing in a field of plenty.
"With no snow in the winter, we shouldn't be here," he said. "It is a miracle crop. And around here, it's about time."
The mound of wheat in the foreground wasn't Billinger's. It was, instead, a seemingly endless flow of wheat that was being dumped on the ground by the Cargill elevator about 2 miles east of WaKeeney. At the Ogallah elevator also being operated by Cargill, a line of hopper cars were being loaded as train engines waited nearby.
Cargill wasn't the only elevator dumping on the ground.
At Frontier Ag Equity in Collyer, trucks were being diverted around the concrete elevator where an auger had been set up.
"The wheat's looking really good," said Nicholas Schamberger, who was directing farmers dumping in the pile.
Billinger, who was driving a truck hauling wheat from a field on the outskirts of WaKeeney on Tuesday, talked about the rough ride wheat has had this year.
With little snow during the winter months and virtually no rain the first three months of the year, farmers had worried the crop might be a bust.
Far from it, as it is turning out.
With low moisture levels, high test weights and relatively high yields -- although few are crowing about how high they are -- the wheat is putting smiles on farmers' faces.
Tuesday's bounty was a field of certified Fuller wheat, seed that eventually will be sold to farmers in the area. Fuller is a Kansas State University-developed wheat.
But Billinger said test weights were high, averaging 63.5 pounds per bushel.
"I can remember the day we could hope for 57 test weights," he said.
The benchmark for wheat is 60 pounds per bushel; the higher the weight, the more bushels a farmer derives when it finally is sold.
Yields are good as well, with reports of 40- to 50-bushels per acre.
"I hear a lot of mid-40s to mid-50s," Billinger said.
And while moisture was plenty dry at the field he was cutting, he said they had to pull out of two fields -- all within 3 miles of each other -- because those fields simply were too wet.
