Last week I finished up the 2013 Hard Winter Wheat Quality Tour by visiting the Kansas City Board of Trade – which, as many know, has been acquired by CME Group and will be moved to the Chicago trading floor in July. Since then, I've done some digging into the role the KCBT and Kansas City played on agriculture in the area. The Board of Trade was first organized in 1856, just three years after Kansas City was incorporated. However, it was during the 1870s that Kansas City, and…

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I was in Colby a couple of days ago as the U.S. Custom Harvesters kicked off the 2013 wheat harvest season with their annual safety seminar. This time last year, several of the crews were already headed into Texas to cut an unseasonably early wheat crop that continued to run ahead of schedule right through a Kansas harvest that was complete before Father’s Day. This year, the crop is as late as last year was early, with yet another freeze in the forecast tonight. But the…

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The percentage of the Kansas wheat crop adversely impacted by freeze damage is expected to go up substantially in the days ahead. It will take several days after the weather warms up to get a handle on just how much damage was done when the temperature hit a record 25 degrees in Wichita  in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, but there is no doubt that the wheat crop is far enough along in south central Kansas that damage is inevitable. Just about all of Kansas was hit with…

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There’s plenty of reason to be optimistic that we can produce more wheat to feed the world’s growing population, says Randy Englund, executive director of the South Dakota Wheat Commission and South Dakota Wheat, Inc. Average yields in South Dakota increased from 6.5 bushels per acre in 1900 to nearly 40 bushels per acre in 2012. If South Dakota’s average wheat yield were to increase as much in the next 112 years, yields in 2124 would be 246 bushels per acre…

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I have been remiss in my duty to follow every emerging, whack-o diet craze. Somehow, gluten-free mushroomed when I wasn’t looking. Oh, I admit, I heard it mentioned a few times and I even spared a moment or two of pity for those poor souls whose bodies can’t tolerate one of one the world’s commonest food ingredients, the gluten in wheat, rye, barley and other grains. But it has been only in the last couple of weeks that I realized how many “gluten-free&rdquo…

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I’ve been to a couple wheat field days lately – Bayer Crop Science’s and Sygneta AgriPro’s for example. I missed Limagrain’s field day because I was out of town, but I heard about varieties that Limagrain, a new player in the North American, market has coming. It’s gratifying to see all the new effort that private and public breeders are putting into wheat. They’ve all are developing varieties coming that will make wheat more competitive with…

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It was several months ago that I first discovered that Galen, my partner Dave's little grandson, has a love of big machines -- tractors, backhoes, graders -- you name it and he thinks it's pretty cool. He lives in Lawrence and recently came to visit. Since it's wheat harvest time, letting him experience a ride in the combine to cut some wheat seemed like a good idea, Sedgwick County farmer Mick Rausch was finishing up the last of his harvest at a field near his home in Garden Plain; a field…

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Most of you already know I'm a pretty enthusiastic grandma who tries to introduce her urban grandkids to life on the farm every chance I get. Never is that more true than during wheat harvest when a chance for a day of "grandma adventure" is becoming legendary in the family. A couple of weeks ago, I got a chance to introduce grandson, Lewis, to a day of meeting farmers and climbing on combines as we got ready for harvest. This weekend, it was time to take his cousins out for a similar…

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As a general rule, nobody is happy with a wheat harvest rain delay. The record-early harvest of 2012 is an exception. When widespread thunderstorms moved across the state on Wednesday and Thursday and high temperatures dropped from the mid-90s to the low 70s, farmers missed by the accompanying hail just breathed a sigh of relief and took a deep breath of fresh air. And those hit by hail ranging from nickel to tennis ball size checked the damage, called the insurance adjuster and drove…

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Driving from the sprawling wheat fields of west-central and western Kansas home into Wichita gave me a unique sense of just how much, little by little, the city is nibbling away at the wide open spaces of Sedgwick County. I can clearly remember when I first moved to Wichita in 1990 how quickly I left the city behind when I headed out 21st Street toward Cheney Reservoir. Maize Road was the edge of the country; 119th and 135th Streets were gravel roads. Today, Wichita's sprawl is evident as…

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