US Winter Wheat Outlook Turns Positive, Gro Model Shows

Recent rainfall has helped the US hard red winter wheat (HRW) crop overcome much of its early season troubles. Steady improvement in Gro’s Hard Red Winter Wheat Yield Forecast Model points to an ample harvest, easing previous worries about drought, as shown by the Gro Drought Index, and extreme freezing.  

The more positive outlook for the US HRW crop comes as conditions in Ukraine are also improving, as seen in Gro’s Black Sea Wheat Yield Forecast Model. Unlike corn and soybeans, global wheat supplies are abundant. 

Gro’s weather and climate analytics show that Kansas, which produces nearly half of US HRW, saw rainfall in central and eastern parts of the state, even as areas in the state’s far west remained dry. Rain also fell in parts of Oklahoma and Texas, the other two main producing states.  

Gro’s Hard Red Winter Wheat Yield Forecast Model, available to Gro Premium subscribers, provides daily, county-level yield predictions for the three major winter wheat producing states. The estimates utilize satellite-derived inputs including evapotranspiration and NDVI, a key measure of vegetative health, which has improved to seasonally normal levels. 

Gro’s model offers valuable insight on the HRW crop progress ahead of this week’s crop tour by the Wheat Quality Council. The tour will assess winter wheat conditions and disease pressure for the crop in Kansas. 

This insight was powered by the Gro platform, which enables better and faster decisions about factors affecting the entire global agricultural ecosystem. Gro organizes over 40,000 datasets from sources around the world into a unified ontology, which allows users to derive valuable insights such as this one. You can explore the data available on Gro with a free account, or please get in touch if you would like to learn more about a specific crop, region, or business issue.