High Wheat Quality May Offset High Flour Prices, Crop 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.

Mike Woolverton, a grain marketing economist at Kansas State University, said 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.

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.

So far, results have come in from Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma. The preliminary composite data is not expected to change much when information is collected from Colorado, Nebraska and North Dakota.