By Mitch Smith Reporting from Syracuse, Kan., near the Colorado-Kansas border.
Aug. 9, 2023 The New York Times
As the war in Ukraine disrupts the global grain market, a volatile climate leaves Kansas on track to harvest its smallest wheat crop in decades.
This single field, just 160 acres of Kansas dirt, tells the story of a torturous wheat season.
One side is a drought-scorched graveyard for grain that never made it to harvest.
Near the center, combines plod through chest-high weeds and underwhelming patches of beige wheat, just enough of it to make a harvest worthwhile.
And over by the tree line, the most tantalizing wheat beckons like a desert mirage. The grain there is flourishing, the beneficiary of a late-season shift from dry to drenching. But it will never be collected: The ground is too waterlogged to support the weight of harvesting equipment.
“It really doesn’t get any crazier than right here, right now,” the farmer of that land, Jason Ochs, said last week as he salvaged what he could from the field.
The main culprit is the extreme drought that, as recently as late April, had ensnared almost the entire western half of the state, and forced many farmers to abandon their crops. More recently, intense rain has eased the drought, but it came too late for much of Kansas’ winter wheat, which was planted in the fall for harvest in late spring and early summer.
The dueling weather extremes have confounded farmers and raised long-term climate questions about the future of the Great Plains wheat crop.
On the Plains, “precipitation and temperature are projected to trend in opposite directions in the future,” said Xiaomao Lin, the state climatologist of Kansas and a professor at Kansas State University. “Specifically, temperatures are expected to rise while rainfall decreases. Both of these changes are detrimental to wheat crops.”
A study Dr. Lin co-wrote last year in the journal Nature Communications linked yield loss in Great Plains winter wheat since the 1980s to periods of intense heat, stiff winds and little moisture, hallmarks of climate change.
Dr. Lin said the early part of the 2022-23 wheat-growing season was the driest on the Plains in 128 years — even drier than during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s — though he cautioned that it was too soon to say precisely what role climate change played in this year’s particular conditions.
Wheat is more than just a crop in Kansas, where “The Wheat State” was once stamped on license plates and where University of Kansas sports fans “wave the wheat” to celebrate a score. Though Kansas farmers plant far fewer acres of wheat now than they did a generation ago — they can often make more money growing corn or soybeans — the state remains one of the country’s leading producers of wheat. The crop is sold for flour on the domestic market and exported in large quantities to Latin America, among other places. (Continue to The New York Times for the full article.)
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