Colorado Winter Wheat Production Breaks Record for Yield per Acre

Colorado winter wheat production broke a record in 2016, with an average yield of 48 bushels per acre. This is the highest ever yield per acre for Colorado and raises the total production in 2016 to 105.12 million bushels.

Colorado Wheat Administrative Committee President and wheat farmer from Byers Mark Linnebur says that cooler weather made a big difference in the record yield.

Linnebur: "I don't know that we received a great amount of moisture. It was a little bit above average, but not a ton above average. The difference was it was just a nice cool spring. It was perfect temperature conditions where we didn't get a May where we saw half the days in the 90s and June wasn't in the 100s. It was nice and cool and let that stuff ripen up slowly. It was just perfect conditions. One of the drawbacks was that we ended up having a lot of rust that we ended up spraying for in some places twice. But if you took care of your rust it turned out extremely well."

Though record breaking yield is a positive, wheat growers are challenged by the lower prices. He continues with how winter wheat seeding is going.

Linnebur: "We're all winter wheat. We do a lot of hard white winter wheat as well. The seeding so far, we've got about half to two-thirds in that I think we'll get up. The other third is pretty hard. It is dried out about 3 to 4 inches. We could go for it, but if we get a rain on top of that it will just curl underneath. We are just waiting and hoping for rain."