5-6 IAN Wheat Status

 How is Idaho doing wheat wise? That’s a very important question for a state that relies heavily on its wheat crop. You hear all kinds of conspiracy theories that Russia is not exporting wheat, weather catastrophes have doomed much of the world’s wheat supply, and that we are just not going to be able to keep up with demand worldwide for wheat grains. Well I called up Blaine Jacobson, executive director of the Idaho wheat commission and asked him for the straight dope on wheat. He was very informative: “Idaho winter wheat the number of acres planted is up 11% and the crop is doing well. It has received a lot of rain and as long as it doesn’t get too hot, too quickly, we will have a nice harvest of our winter wheat. Spring wheat is a little bit slow right now because we’ve had a lot of spring rains, and frankly there are some parts of the state that typically would be doing fieldwork right now but they are still under snow. So with the late spring the picture on spring wheat remains to be told. We think spring wheat will be up a little bit but not as much as the winter wheat crop. All of the seed dealers report that they are out of seed for spring wheat but I think the spring wheat crop will be comparable to last year and maybe even up a little bit.”