01/13/05 PNW wheat acres up, U.S. down

Farm and Ranch January 13, 2005 Farmers in all three Pacific Northwest States took advantage of good seeding conditions and adequate soil moisture and planted more acres of winter wheat this past fall than they did the previous year. Acreage in Washington and Oregon is up six percent, in Idaho up three percent. But the USDA says the nation's farmers as a whole sowed four percent fewer acres of winter wheat, 41.6 million acres. Soft white winter wheat acreage, the predominate class of wheat in the PNW, is estimated up four precent at 4.5 million acres. Hard red winter wheat plantings in the U.S. are at 30.5 million acres are down one percent from 2004. Mark Chiodo of Slipka Trading in Minneapolis, says the biggest drop was in soft red winter wheat acreage grown in the Midwest and eastern U.S., down 19 percent from a year ago at 6.6 million acres. Chiodo: "They have had a lot of problems with vomatoxin in the wheat, which is not hardly excepted anywhere. Certainly not for human consumption. You can't get it very much into the feed ration. And of course if you have to sell wheat for feed you are already out of the game. They had kind of a wet fall when they got done harvesting corn and beans. So it was a combination of those two items." Once the market digests all of the USDA numbers issued this week Chiodo expects the focus will again be on exports. USDA did increase U.S. wheat ending stocks 30 million bushels in its supply and demand report with more than half of that going to white wheat supplies. World wheat production and supplies were also up slightly from last month's forecast. I'm Bob Hoff and that's the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on the Northwest Ag Information Network.