By JAMES BELL
Hays Post
After a week of sporadic rain across western Kansas, generally warm and windy weather dried the fields enough for wheat producers to get back into their combines and begin to wrap up the wheat harvest that started the last week of June around Ellis County.
“It’s a little later than usual and with the rains, it’s a little longer than we anticipated,” said Brian Witt, Hays coordinator at Midland Marketing.
In the southern part of Ellis County, Witt said the harvest is nearly complete. North of Hays, producers have been delayed a bit longer.
He estimated Rush County was already 80 percent to 90 percent complete, with only a few producers in small areas who were hit with rain in the last few days needing to return to the fields to wrap up.
To the north, they are further behind, Witt said, with areas near Rooks County about 50 percent complete.
But with dry conditions through the area most of the day Monday and no rain forecasted past Tuesday, producers should be able to complete the harvest soon.
South of Hays, Witt said by the end of the week he anticipated producers in southern Ellis County should be able to complete the harvest, while northern parts of the county may be a day or two later, pushing through to Monday.
At the Hays elevator, received bushels have gone down drastically since Wednesday, Witt said.
“We are taking about a tenth of what we were four or five days ago,” he said, noting a significant slowdown starting after the rains that fell in the latter part of last week.
While the harvest began later than normal, early indicators of a good crop have held.
“Overall, it was a very good harvest,” Witt said. “Yields came out better than what everyone anticipated.
“It was definitely an above average crop.”
In their weekly crop report released Monday, the National Agricultural Statistics Service rated 16 percent of winter wheat across the state as excellent and 42 percent as good.
Only 4 percent of the crop was rated very poor and 11 percent poor, while the remaining 27 was rated as fair.
In the central district, around 98 percent of winter wheat was rated as mature by the service, with 76 percent harvested.
Across the state, 92 percent has matured and only 61 percent had been harvested.
