Drought Leads To The Abandonments of Kansas Wheat Fields

Months of dry weather have some Kansas farmers abandoning their hard red winter wheat acres.

“As you drive around the state right now, you see some fields that have been sprayed with the intention of planting spring-seeded, fall-harvested crops into them: corn, sorghum, maybe soybeans, depending on where it's at," noted Kansas State University Extension's Dan O'Brien.  "But I've seen that, I guess, more so in the central part of the state. In the western part of the state, we vary quite a bit. It's, I guess, I'd call it spotty.”

There are higher industry estimates of the number of acres Kansas farmers might abandon because of the persisting drought.  However, O'Brien (not the Dan O’Brien decathlete from the University of Idaho) says, at the moment, he would put it somewhere in the range of 10%-13%.

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