06/01/06 Letter to seedsmen on HRW

Farm and Ranch June 1, 2006 The significantly higher market price and better federal support of hard red winter wheat compared to soft white wheat is expected to attract even more farmers to plant hard red wheat this fall. Concern about what that might mean for wheat quality and export markets is prompting the Washington Wheat Commission to send out a letter to seedsmen and elevator operators. Commission Chairman Randy Suess explains. Suess: "It will be for this fall so when people are going to be considering what they are going to be putting into the ground. We just want them to be concerned about quality. We have come up with our quality list and it is something that we have worked on for a long time. We are using a minimum of three-years of data on coming up with quality characteristics. We just want people to keep it in the forefront of their mind. We don't want to go down the road of having a lot of poor quality red wheat because it would be too hard to eliminate that into a lot of markets. So keep that in mind farmers when you are going to be putting your red wheat in this fall. And it is going to be available to all of the seed dealers." Data the Washington Wheat Commission collects from Certified Seed sales showed hard red winter wheat acres in the state were up 20 percent last year and for the crop in the field right now, seed sales for hard red were up 60 percent. Longer term new hard red winter wheat varieties with good end use quality are expected to make quality concerns a moot point. I'm Bob Hoff and that's the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on the Northwest Ag Information Network.