High quality could offset wheat shortages

WICHITA, Kan. — The extraordinary quality of this year’s winter wheat harvest in the Southern Plains may help offset the high cost of flour for millers and consumers, preliminary data shows.

The hard red winter wheat crop quality is so high that flour mills will be able to offset shortages of the crop by combining it with other, more plentiful wheat types, said Mike Woolverton, a grain marketing economist at Kansas State University.

“To me, this is the good news in this really tough year for wheat producers,” he said.

The nation faces a shortage of good quality milling wheat this year because of the smaller harvests in states that produce hard red winter wheat. Also problematic is a shrinking crop of spring wheat, which is typically used for making breads.

The winter wheat harvest results in the Southern Plains mean those growers will likely receive premium prices for their crop.

The winter wheat’s high quality means millers will be able to use more of other types of wheat in their flour blends than they normally would, helping to moderate prices consumers pay for their flour and some baked goods.

“This will allow millers to use soft red winter wheat — which is in abundant supply this year — and blend flours together to come up with an acceptable level for bakers,” Woolverton said.

Kansas State conducted the wheat quality survey this year in the nation’s hard red winter wheat production area in the Great Plains.

So far, results have come in from Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma, which produce two-thirds of the nation’s hard red winter wheat crop. The preliminary composite data is not expected to change much when information is collected from Colorado, Nebraska and North Dakota, he said.

The average test weight for the nation’s hard red winter wheat crop was 60.7 pounds per bushel, up slightly from the 60 pounds per bushel harvested last year, Woolverton said.

But the more significant change was in protein levels, which averaged 13.9 percent in the three states. That compares with an average of 12.1 percent last year and is considered a “big jump,” brought on by drought stress during the growing season.

Also up significantly was the percentage of gluten in this year’s hard red winter wheat crop across the three states. It averaged 33.8 percent, compared with 29.5 percent last year.

“Protein and gluten levels are really significant because for bakers looking for high protein content to make bread, it is the gluten that traps gases to make bread rise — so the higher the number, the better,” Woolverton said.

Because the wheat quality report shows data by specific areas within states, millers can pinpoint places with the highest quality wheat and buy wheat at a premium price from those elevators, Woolverton said.

Although there are isolated pockets, the best quality hard red winter wheat in the nation was harvested from a roughly 100-mile wide corridor that extends from Enid, Okla., to Concordia, Kan., he said.