First harvest report from Wheat Marketing Center

Farm and Ranch August 10, 2010 The Wheat Marketing Center in Portland has made its first weekly report on samples collected from this year’s wheat harvest in the Pacific Northwest. About two-thirds of the first week’s samples were from Oregon, the remainder from Washington. The limited number of samples showed good test weight for soft white wheat at 60.8 pounds a bushel, low moisture content at 9.1 percent and medium protein at 9.9 percent.

The winter wheat harvest in the PNW has progressed to 68 percent complete in Oregon, 37 percent done in Washington and 18 percent complete in Idaho. All those are ten or more points behind the five year average for now. In Washington and Idaho less than ten percent of spring wheat and barley have been cut. Nationally, 87 percent of the winter wheat and 20 percent of the spring wheat is in the bin.

The U.S. corn crop continues to develop slightly ahead of the normal pace and is in 71 percent good to excellent condition, a couple of points better than last year at this time.

On Thursday of this week we will get the USDA’s latest take on world wheat production and supply and demand;

Bange: “Clearly we are looking very closely at what is going on n Russia now, Ukraine. There are some issues there obviously everyone knows about.”

That’s Gerry Bange of USDA’s World Outlook Board which puts out the supply and demand reports for grains. With the reduced production in the Black Sea region we’ll see what USDA forecasts now for U.S. wheat exports.

I’m Bob Hoff and that’s the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on Northwest Aginfo Net.