By ANN ALLEN
Indiana Correspondent

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Indiana farmers planted 430,000 acres of wheat last fall, up significantly from the 250,000 acres planted in 2009. Drawing on those numbers from the USDA, Purdue University ag Economist Chris Hurt said winter wheat is making a mini-comeback in Indiana.

He added, however, as a word of caution: “How long that comeback lasts could be determined by weather and other crop opportunities.”

Soft red winter wheat, the kind used in cookies and pastries, is Indiana’s No. 3 row crop, but it falls well behind corn and soybeans – 13.8 million bushels in 2010 compared with 890 million bushels of corn and 258 million bushels of soybeans.

Fulton County, Ind. farmer Tom Weaver stopped raising winter wheat several years ago. “It just doesn’t fit in our crop rotation,” he said.
Besides, he has bad memories of years when he struggled to plant wheat with a 13-foot drill between milking a herd of cows morning and evening.

“I managed to get 200 acres planted,” he said. “I planted day and night to get it in early, but when spring came, the crop wasn’t good. That was the year late planting paid off. The year I planted late, the fields planted early were the best. A dry fall can make a big difference. It’s just hard to tell ahead of time which will work.”

His neighbor Kris Fear, however, has doubled his wheat acreage, thanks in part to having rented an additional farm. He and his father, Ross, have a corn-bean-wheat rotation that works well for them. “And,” he added, “wheat prices were good at planting time.”

They augment their rotation by obtaining liquid hog manure from area farmers that they inject into their fields after the wheat crop is harvested. “Hog manure provides micro-nutrients that help build up the soil,” he said.
According to Hurt, wheat prices escalated last fall, thanks to poor wheat production in Russia and Canada.

“Secondly,” he added, “conditions for planting wheat improved dramatically with the early corn and soybean harvest that helped producers get wheat planted in a timely manner.”

Even with cash prices for wheat hovering at $7 per bushel and corn trading at about $6 a bushel and soybeans at $13.50 a bushel, Hurt feels wheat might not be able to compete with $6 corn since farmers can produce far more bushels of corn per acre than wheat.

Hurt has concerns about the quality of the current wheat crop. “The last crop condition report for fall-seeded wheat indicated that 25 percent of the crop was in poor or very poor condition,” he said.

“Producers with wheat in poor condition can tear up the wheat crop and plant corn or soybeans,” he said. “It’s not the only alternative, but it is viable economically, especially in northern Indiana counties where they normally cannot grow double-crop soybeans with a wheat crop.”

While he doesn’t recommend farmers give on poor wheat crops, he added, “Wheat is high-priced, but corn and soybeans are very high-priced. That means returns may be higher to tear up existing wheat and plant to single-crop corn or soybeans this spring.”