It is often said that wheat is a crop that seems to have nine lives, and it looks like that saying will be tested this season with a severe ongoing drought in southwest Kansas.
Abundant summer rains helped to build good profile moisture under dryland fallow acres. Dryland wheat that was drilled during the optimum planting window last fall developed a better secondary root system to tap into the moisture as compared to the later drilled wheat.
As wheat approaches joint stage in early April, the water use of the plant begins to increase and timely rains to refill the surface moisture profile will be needed to sustain the plant as it moves into the flowering and grain fill stage.
According to the National Agriculture Statistics Service, winter wheat in Kansas is rated 15 percent very poor, 34 percent poor, 38 percent fair, 12 percent good and 1 percent excellent for the week ending on March 25.
I’m surprised the wheat looks as good as it does, quite frankly, but I think the sustained cool weather in March has kept the water use and stress down. Needless to say, this crop is way overdue for a good drink. A period of above normal temperatures may reveal the true status of this current crop, however.
Bryan Boroughs is a technical service agronomist at Servi-Tech and consults on wheat in Haskell, Gray and Finney counties in Kansas. To send a question to Ask the Agronomist, send an email to [email protected] with the subject line “Ask the Agronomist” or tweet @ServiTechInc or @HighPlainsJrnl with the hashtag #AsktheAgronomist.
