Odessa-area wheat harvest now in full swing

The area’s wheat harvest is now in full swing. A few farmers were ready to go a week ago, but the prior weekend’s thunderstorm postponed things for a few more days while everything dried out again.

According to both Mark Cronrath of the Odessa Trading Company and Byron Behne of the Odessa Union Warehouse Company, frost damage from last winter is turning out to be the primary weather event affecting yields for most farmers this year. Both men also said that yields ranged all the way from bad to average to good, depending on the amount of frost damage encountered.

Cronrath reported yields coming in to OTC’s stations from a very poor 21 bushels/acre all the way up to 65 bushels/acre on dryland fields. He also said he felt that the late rains received by area farmers were actually too late to do any good and that the heat, when it finally arrived, was at the wrong time in terms of the pollination cycle. Nevertheless, frost during the mostly snowless winter was the primary culprit for those farmers getting really low yields.

With regard to quality, however, Cronrath said that OTC was seeing plenty of #1-grade wheat coming in, with test weights running at around 60 to 62. Protein levels were also good, he said, mostly in the 13 to 14 percent range.

Irrigated fields are just now beginning to be harvested, and since they are less dependent on the unpredictable nature of the weather, the expected yields and quality are thought to be about the same as they were last year.

Behne estimated that farmers hauling to the Union’s elevators were at about 15 to 20 percent of completion. Cronrath said OTC’s elevators have seen about 35 percent of their expected harvest come in. The difference mostly depends on where the elevators are located, since the fields tend to ripen first in the southwest portion of the area surrounding Odessa, moving then toward the northeast as the summer progresses.

New grain stations

OTC/Ritzville Warehouse has constructed its newest grain receiving station on SR 28 between Lamona and Harrington. It has been named the Power station and was built at the request of farmers in that area who wanted a shorter travel distance to deliver their wheat to the elevator. With only a 375,000 bushel capacity in its two tanks, the station will have to be emptied frequently, said Cronrath, but the station’s new truck scale is already seeing plenty of loads of wheat delivered.

The Power station is not the only new station being built in the Columbia Basin. Another facility is under construction at Lind. At the request of the Stahl Hutterian colony, which had trucked previously to the Schrag elevator, the new station consists right now of just a long scale platform, scale house and an auger that moves the wheat to a large pile on the ground. The new station is part of the former Union Elevator Lind, which was purchased from its local farmer owners last year by Gavilon, a large U.S. grain merchant, which has now been sold in turn to a Japanese company called Marubeni for $3.6 billion.

According to the Reuters news agency in a May 29, 2012 report on the impending deal, Gavilon is the third-largest U.S. grain merchant with about 320 million bushels of storage capacity, after Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland. The purchase of Gavilon by Marubeni will nearly double the Japanese company’s grain-trading volume and extend its lead over its Japanese rivals. According to Reuters, the company believes that Chinese demand for imported corn will continue to surge.

“It’s a move to complete a grains-supply chain of elevators, export terminals, freight handling and an end-user market, and the target is the growing market of China,” Akio Shibata, president of the Natural Resource Research Institute in Tokyo, told Reuters.

Prices are high

Current wheat prices are above $8 per bushel for all types, with dark northern spring wheat coming in at $9.61 as August 1, 2012. Even with higher operating costs for fuel, fertilizer and other essentials, farmers stand to make a profit again this year.