* WHAT: Wheat Quality Council’s annual US HRW tour
* WHEN: May 1-3
* WHERE: Kansas and three neighboring states
By Michael Hirtzer
CHICAGO, April 30 (Reuters) – Kansas farmer Jerry
McReynolds’ wheat fields have developed a full month early,
which has him optimistic for a harvest that should yield better
than last year’s drought-reduced crop.
Many farmers in Kansas and across southern U.S. Plains
states of Texas and Oklahoma seeded their crop at the time of a
devastating drought with little hope of a good crop but timely
snow and rain brought the wheat back from the brink.
There are still threats to the crop, such as a late frost,
before the harvest but odds are slim of any major failure at
this stage of plant development.
“It’s a crazy year. It looks like the earliest wheat we’ve
ever had, maybe the earliest in history,” said McReynolds, 65,
who farms in Rooks County, in north-central Kansas.
Crop scouts will fan out across the state this week to
inspect the crop as part of an annual tour organized by the
Wheat Quality Council.
The largest planted wheat area in four years and the
expected early harvest already have prices for the hard red
winter wheat, which is widely used in breadmaking, the lowest
in more than a year.
“It’s a good crop and, in general, there’s plenty of wheat
in the world,” said Adam Tepper, commodities analyst with Arlon
Group, an agriculture-focused investment company in New York and
a crop scout on the tour.
The Kansas yield should be an improvement over last year’s
35 bushels per acre. That yield was the lowest in four years,
according to the U.S. Agriculture Department.
Meanwhile, world wheat stocks of roughly 206 million tonnes
are the largest in 11 years amid a rebound in global production,
USDA said.
A record-large group of 100 attendees will take part in the
Hard Wheat Quality Tour, up from about 70 last year. They are
from agriculture powerhouses like Archer Daniels Midland
, Bunge LTD and Cargill as well as from
traders such as Gavilon and Glencore.
Also scheduled to tour the wheat fields is a sustainability
manager from Walmart Stores Inc, a sourcing manager from
grocer Kroger Co, plus represenatives from ConAgra Foods
Inc and Mexican breadmaker Grupo Bimbo.
Kicking off in Manhattan, Kansas, the tour will access yield
potential in some 400 wheat fields over three days across the
state, dipping into parts of Colorado, Nebraska and Oklahoma,
before concluding in Kansas City on Thursday where it will issue
its final production and yield estimates.
Along the route, scouts will count the number of wheat
plants in a 3-foot row (about 1 meter) and the number of grain
kernels in each head.
The tour’s crop estimate will precede USDA’s first HRW wheat
production forecast due on May 10.
“The main thing is that conditions have certainly improved
and we’ll be looking to see if the crop has responded to those
improved conditions,” said Jefferies Bache analyst Shawn
McCambridge.
The region is recovering after the worst drought in at least
four decades that parched parts of Kansas and, to a greater
extent, Oklahoma and Texas. Mild drought conditions persist in
southwest Kansas while west Texas still suffers from extreme
drought conditions.
However, more frequent rainfall elsewhere in Kansas as well
as unseasonably warm weather earlier this year sped the HRW
wheat crop’s development as it broke dormancy.
Farmer Tom Morton, who grows wheat, cotton and sorghum south
of Wichita in south-central Kansas, said he has the earliest
wheat crop ever and could harvest in May, instead of mid- to
late-June as in normal years.
“I don’t believe we’ve ever cut wheat in May in my lifetime
and that’s definitely a possibility this year,” Morton, 63,
said.
Still, the dirt in his fields is cracking and he would
welcome a rain to help finish the crop.
“At the moment, I’m somewhat comfortable if we don’t get any
rain. We’re not in bad shape on moisture.”
Hard red winter wheat futures have declined about 12
percent from their high on Feb. 1 at the Kansas City Board of
Trade, pressured by expectations of a large harvest and
bountiful existing global wheat supplies.
The premium of KCBT futures over the lower-quality benchmark
soft red winter wheat contract at the Chicago Board of Trade
on Friday narrowed to its smallest since August 2010 as
conditions in the southern Plains improved.
(Reporting By Michael Hirtzer; Editing by Bob Burgdorfer)
