For farmer Dennis Shields, the fate of his new wheat crop is largely out of his control. In this first week of May - some 45-60 days from harvest - whether or not Shields makes a tidy profit or suffers a painful loss this summer is all up to the weather.

“It all depends on June,” said the 67-year-old Shields, who has been farming near Lindsborg, Kansas, more than 40 years.

If hot and dry weather settles into the U.S. Heartland as the newly emerging hard red winter wheat crop moves into the crucial grain filling period of development, kernels will likely shrivel and yield potential could shrink. But if mild conditions continue, the new crop could be a bin buster.

The crop is maturing later than normal this year with a more shallow root system due to late planting and a cooler-than-normal, wet spring, factors that have left the wheat crop more vulnerable than typical to the whims of weather.
“You get some 100-degree days … you’ll lose bushels and test weight will probably go down,” said Bob Bennett, Kansas State University grain quality specialist.

Efforts to determine the production potential for the new U.S. winter wheat crop, in particular the crop in top U.S. producer Kansas, is a near-obsession this season with an assortment of food industry players, from farmers to bakers, and export merchandisers to Mexican millers. Record wheat prices and short stocks around the world have generated high interest in this year’s wheat crop.

A group of more than 60 such industry representatives were taking part this week in a survey of hundreds of Kansas wheat fields as part of a Wheat Quality Council crop tour.

The tour will culminate on Thursday when participants come up with an estimated average yield and production tally for this year’s Kansas winter wheat crop.

A year ago at this time, the crop was looking very healthy, aside from some pockets of freeze-damaged fields. But high hopes were dashed when late-season heavy rains washed out many fields. So this year, even though the crop appears mostly healthy, with the potential for good production, few are willing to start counting on the bushels yet.

“We are a long way from getting this crop into the bin,” said ADM wheat quality specialist Dave Green.

The U.S. government will issue its first winter wheat production estimate on Friday.

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The long, wet road from Chicago to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, goes through Denver… at least for this crop scout. Powerful thunderstorms cancelled one of my flights, delayed a second seriously-rerouted one, and added nearly 1,000 miles and 8 hours to a 450-mile trip that shouldn’t normally take much more than an hour.

Other scouts on the John Deere Pro Farmer Midwest crop tour, some traveling from as far as Argentina, Brazil, or Great Brittain, had an equally difficult time getting to Sioux Falls because of the storm, arriving as late as 3 a.m. for a brief nap before Monday’s 7 a.m. start. Bloodshot eyes and extra large cups of coffee, which usually begin showing up around day two or three of the four-day tour, were the norm on Monday morning.

But as inconvenient as the storms were for air travelers, all this rain could do wonders for the soybean crop, which is fully in pod-filling mode. Mid-season heat and drought stress were showing in the low pod counts in some fields, but persistent rain in the past few weeks has turned things around for soy growers in southeastern South Dakota. As Chip Flory, the director of the tour’s western leg noted, muddy boots on the mid-August crop tour means soybean yields would likely rise from the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Aug. 1 estimates. The torrential downpour that crop scouts awoke to find on Monday morning ensured there would be plenty of upside along with the mud.

Organizers have for the first time asked scouts to take note if corn has been planted in fields that housed corn last year, not necessarily to gauge the effects of this year of corn-on-corn planting but to start a database to gauge its effects on yields for future tours. One of the themes of this year’s tour is how much corn is really out there after U.S. farmers seeded more corn this year than they have since 1944 to meet rising demand from ethanol producers. In fact, organizers have acknowledged that they fully expected scouts to have a hard time finding as many soybean fields to survey as they do corn fields. That has not been too much of an issue thusfar, but I’m told it will be as we work our way south and east through the big ethanol producing states of Nebraska and Iowa.

I’ll get my next rest — six hours of sleep if I’m lucky — in Nebraska, known as the Corn Husker state despite large swathes of land more suitable for wheat or sorghum planting than for corn and soybeans. Many farmers there use irrigation pivots to do Mother Nature’s work if she has an off year. She’s been pretty busy lately in South Dakota.

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    Mud boots, check. Sun screen, check. Bug spray, check.
   The corn is 8-feet tall, the soybeans are setting and filling pods and harvest of these key food and livestock feed crops is only weeks away. That means it’s time for the annual tour of central U.S. farm fields in an aim to assess yields and production.
    Corn and soy are among the Midwestern pillars of the country’s multi-billion-dollar agricultural sector, consumed by people from Indonesia to Iraq. The condition of the new crops impacts pricing and purchasing decisions around the world.
    More than 70 crop specialists are expected to participate in the industry-sponsored tour, which begins Monday and includes farmers, merchandisers and government officials. Driving from field to field in key growing states like Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska and Minnesota, the crop scouts  will inspect corn and soybean fields in the heart of the U.S. grain belt. 
    Colleague Karl Plume and myself, both reporters for Reuters, will be joining in on the four-day jaunt, which organizers have broken into western and eastern segments.
    The U.S. Department of Agriculture last week forecast this year’s U.S. corn crop a record 13.054 billion bushels, with an average yield of 152.8 bushels per acre, the second-highest yield on record.
    That is largely due farmers this year planting the largest amount of corn land - 92.9 million acres - since 1944 to take advantage of the rise in corn prices to 10-year highs in February this year amid demand from the ethanol sector.
    Still, some crop specialists worry that a lack of rainfall in recent weeks in the southern Midwest could drop soy yields.
In fact, the USDA, in its monthly report on Aug. 10, lowered its U.S. soybean crop estimate to 2.625 billion bushels, with an average yield of 41.966 bpa.
    The crop scouts will come up with their own estimates at the conclusion of the tour after viewing hundreds of fields and getting down in the dirt to measure such things as corn ear lengths, numbers of kernels and soybean pods.
    Hundred-degree days, 12-hour drives - here we come!