Ban Lifted & Wheat Harvest Moving Right Along

Ban Lifted & Wheat Harvest Moving Right Along

I’m Lacy Gray with Washington Ag Today.

A two month ban imposed by Japan on U.S. western white wheat has been lifted after evidence collected by APHIS indicated that the discovery of unapproved GM wheat on an Oregon farm earlier this year was an isolated incident and was confined to that one field in Oregon. A large portion of the wheat grown in the Northwest is exported to Japan and other overseas markets. Glen Squires, CEO of the Washington Grain Commission, had this to say about Japan’s announcement.

SQUIRES: The fact that Japan has tendered for 90 thousand metric tons and they’re back in the market is huge - that’s really positive. We’re pretty excited for that and we appreciate their attention and thoroughness and that they are comfortable now with tendering. We’ve long realized or thought that there wasn’t a problem but we’re glad they reached that conclusion and they’re back in the market.

Squires also had this quick update on wheat harvest here in the state.

SQUIRES: USDA says that winter wheat harvest is 32% complete versus 18% last year and 16% for the five year average so we’re actually ahead of kind of a normal harvest. Things dried off, heated up, and so harvest is moving right along. We’re looking at probably about a 135 million bushel crop - last year was about 146 million bushels.

Squires reports that while there was a slight impact on wheat conditions due to earlier frost that occurred late in the season, for the most part yields appear to be average, as last year’s crop had extremely high yields.

I’m Lacy Gray and that’s Washington Ag Today on the Ag Information Network.