Kansas wheat tour finds variable crop prospects, some disease

By Julie Ingwersen SMITH CENTER, Kan. (Reuters) - Winter wheat yield prospects in northern Kansas were mixed compared to last year's drought-hit crop, with plants struggling to overcome the effects of dry weather earlier in the growing season, scouts on an annual crop tour said on Tuesday. Yield-robbing diseases, particularly stripe rust, were apparent in fields in north-central Kansas. Scouts on one route of the Wheat Quality Council's tour found light to moderate stripe rust in three of the first five fields checked. Since wet conditions tend to help diseases spread, pressure on yields may increase in some areas after heavy rains fell Monday parts of Kansas, the top U.S. winter wheat producer. The diseases may offset the moisture's benefits. "The rain is definitely going to benefit the crop, but we are seeing a lot of variability. The high-end yield potential isn't there," said Justin Gilpin, chief executive of the Kansas Wheat Commission, who is on the tour. "The drought we had before has already limited the yields," added Romulo Lollato, an agronomy doctoral student at Oklahoma State University who is on the tour. Scouts in one car traveling through Riley, Clay, Washington, Cloud and Republic Counties in north-central Kansas made six field stops and calculated an average yield of 36.3 bushels per acre (bpa), below the year-ago tour calculation along the same route of 39.6 bpa. Another tour group traveling slightly farther south made four stops and calculated an average of 44 bpa, above the year-ago tour average for the same route of 34.4 bpa. "We have not been seeing the diseases that everyone else is talking about," noted Daryl Strouts, executive director of the Kansas Wheat Alliance, a scout on that second route. A third group traveling through Salina to Russell, in central Kansas, scouted eight fields and projected an average yield of just under 30 bu/acre, in line with the tour's year-ago average on that route. The average Kansas wheat yield in 2014 was 28.0 bpa, a 19-year low. About 90 crop scouts from are traveling from Manhattan to Colby, Kansas, on the first day of the Wheat Quality Council's three-day tour. The tour is scheduled to release a final yield forecast for Kansas on Thursday. The U.S. Department of Agriculture in its weekly crop report issued on Monday rated 43 percent of the U.S. winter wheat crop as good to excellent, up from 42 percent the previous week. (Reporting by Julie Ingwersen, editing by G Crosse)