BELLEVILLE, Ill. — By mid-April, wheat growers in Illinois had high hopes of surpassing last year’s record winter wheat crop yield.

  

Conditions were perfect. Decent cover during the winter season, and then spring temperatures that put most of Illinois’ crop almost three weeks ahead

of schedule. Then the rains hit.

In some spots, from late April to early May, double-digit inches of rain had growers worried whether recent sprayings would take hold.

“Too much rain is kind of an understatement,” said Illinois Wheat Assoc. President John Ernst, who farms in southeast Illinois and was a participant in last month’s annual IWA wheat tour. “We had 11 inches in four or five days (last month) and the following week we had another 3.5 inches.”

And while the USDA still predicted last month that the state was expected to come close to last year’s record yield of an average 74 bushels per acre, tour participants came away with a distinctly different take.

“I definitely don’t see us breaking that (record) this year,” said Dave DeVore, of Siemer Milling in central Illinois. “We were very average on the tiller counts, and every field, we saw some flag leaf damage, although hopefully the plants are far enough along it won’t be a real big issue.”

Several other growers came away with the same conclusion; this year’s crop will 

still be fairly good, just not as good as last year’s harvest. If weather conditions cooperate and stay warm and dry, harvesting this year could begin as early as this weekend, about 10 earlier than normal, several growers said.

Wehmeyer Seed owner Dale Wehmeyer said he believes the crop this year will be as good as it is because of timely fungicide applications, improved genetic resistance and cooler spring weather that kept diseases in check. 

 

“We know stripe rust moved in early this year, but it never really took off. We were also set up again for scab, but it’s been cool and scab likes it warm. And the new varieties are showing an advantage,” Wehmeyer said.

The storm systems that moved through the region in late April and early May hit top wheat-producing state Kansas much harder, dumping several inches of snow in the western half of the state. Growers there said up to half of the state’s crop this year is lost.

Back in Illinois, since the storms, the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service has downgraded wheat’s quality, with 51 percent of the state’s crop rated as excellent or good at the end of May. Before the storms hit, that total was 74 percent.

Growers for this season planted about 10 percent fewer acres of wheat than the year before, down to about 440,000 acres. The top three wheat producing counties in the state were pegged to produce average yields of about 70 bushels per acre, based on the tour’s results.