The Whole Wheat Story: Yields Rise, Acres Fall
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Indiana-grown wheat is gradually going the way of the state's "amber waves of grain" license plate.
Hoosier farmers this year will harvest the fewest wheat acres on record. The 380,000 acres harvested falls beneath the previous low of 450,000 acres in 1992.
The state's wheat harvest record is 3.1 million acres, set in 1884. Indiana agricultural records date back to 1866.
Meanwhile, Ohio's harvest is nearly completed and favorable weather conditions have helped farmers enjoy a third straight year of high wheat yields.
Indiana wheat acreage has been in a downward cycle for about a century, said Chris Hurt, a Purdue University agricultural economist. And while production per acre is up, farmers aren't likely to grow more wheat in the years ahead, he said.
Several factors are responsible for the wheat decline.
"Economics would probably have to be the big driver," Hurt said. "We have seen greater specialization in cropping systems and seen farmers' ability to go from several crops in a rotation down to really just two crops -- corn and soybeans. This meant that wheat could come out of the rotation -- that the economic returns were actually better for corn and soybeans in Indiana."
Wheat prices are about $2.30-$2.40 per bushel, with corn at around $2 a bushel and soybeans in the $5 per bushel range.
"But corn has a very high yield," Hurt said. "We see corn yields of 145 bushels per acre, while wheat yields are closer to 60 bushels. Yields on soybeans are creeping up toward what wheat yields are, yet soybean prices are considerably higher than wheat prices."
Government support programs favor corn and soybean production, another incentive for farmers to move away from wheat, Hurt said.
"A third factor is that over time, we've seen much better transportation infrastructure," he said. "Better transportation allows more regional specialization. So we've seen wheat production shift to the Great Plains, with less wheat production elsewhere in the country."
Overall, U.S. wheat production is down, Hurt said.
"Especially in the last 20 years, we've lost some market share in the world market," he said. "We've seen exports decrease as much as 40 percent from the peaks of the early 1980s and, consequently, we have less total demand for wheat exports. The United States is actually a fairly small producer of wheat in the world -- currently only 9 percent of world production."
As wheat acres descend to record lows in Indiana, yield per acre is rising to new highs, said Ralph Gann, state statistician at the Purdue-based Indiana Agricultural Statistics Service.
Yields should approach 66 bushels per acre this year, near last year's record 69 bushels an acre. Total 2001 Indiana production is estimated at 25 million bushels, Gann said. In comparison, record low yields of 7 bushels per acre and 8.1 million bushels produced both occurred in 1900, when Indiana farmers harvested about 2.8 million wheat acres.
"It seems unusual to be setting new record-high yields in recent years, and at the same time having acreage dropping to new all-time record lows," Gann said.
Ohio farmers are posting average yields between 60 and 80 bushels per acre this year, with some fields pushing 100 bushels an acre, said Pat Lipps, Ohio State University plant pathologist.
"We've had three good years of wheat yield," Lipps said. "The yields over the past two years were exceptional because of the mild winters we had. This year we had more of the normal Ohio winter weather, which caused some problems with frost heaving in early March, so the head counts were lower than previous years."
Despite the winter injury and the wet spring, Ohio farmers produced a good quality crop, Lipps said. Disease and insects did little damage to wheat. Head scab levels were low, and even an armyworm infestation caused minimal harm, he said.
"The armyworm can be a particular problem in the state because it doesn't show up frequently enough for us to collect good information," he said. "It's an insect that usually shows up once or twice every 20 years.
"This was our year for the armyworm, but the insect attacked the plants late in development. The heads were not clipped and the flag leaves were removed late enough in the season that it didn't affect yields as much as we had expected."
Although wheat acres are slipping in many states, the crop won't disappear, Purdue's Hurt said. In Indiana, future wheat production will depend on weather, support programs and geography, he said.
"The economics work best in the southern part of the state, where there are double-cropping opportunities," Hurt said. "Those continue to be quite competitive with single-crop corn or single-crop soybeans. So we encourage producers there to continue to look at wheat in their crop mix."
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