South Central Washington Has Wheat Woes

Earlier this week at the Washington Grain Commission’s meeting, Commissioner and owner/operator of Tri-State Seed Company Dana Heron gave an update on the wheat crop from the district he represents of Benton, Franklin, Yakima, Klickitat. The news is not good, as Heron explains.

Heron: “We’ve been suffering from mid-last year from reduced moisture — kinda droughty. Everybody loved the weather in October it was just gorgeous but the typical rains that follow that weather never came. Consequently we seeded our crop in very dry conditions. Some of the farmers who seeded early got sketchy stands and those spots needed to be over seeded. We did that on our own farm, we over seeded 400 to 500 acres. Rain still didn’t come — we did a lot of prayer time on that issue. The fact is when wheat plants are stressed for drought, they are a lot more susceptible to winter damage and that is what has happened to a large degree. The drought has increased the plant mortality and so the crop is certainly not normal and there is a lot of winter damage and lots of reseeding going on.”

For those areas like the Connell south to the Horse Heaven Hills that begin seeding earlier there has been a bit of a shortage in the availability of spring seed. Heron says that those later growing area country elevators are hesitating to release their seed until they are sure they have enough for their own growers. Heron said though the problem should sort itself out soon.