Crop progress and a stripe rust update

Crop progress and a stripe rust update

Farm and Ranch April 20, 2010 Xianming Chen with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in Pullman says a scouting trip April 15th did not find any stripe rust in wheat fields in the Horse Heaven Hills and Walla Walla regions of Washington. However, Chen reports the disease was just starting to appear in wheat nurseries at the Hermiston, Oregon Experiment Station. In western Washington stripe rust was common in commercial wheat fields and most had been sprayed with fungicides.

USDA meteorologist Mark Brusberg says the winter wheat crop nationally continues to improve.

Brusberg: “Overall conditions are very good. The percentage of the crop rated good to excellent was 69% this week. That is up from last week and it is much better than last year‘s 43 percent. And the combination of the warm, showery weather on the Great Plains where it had been dry and the warm dry weather in the soft red winter wheat areas of the Midwest where it had been too time, really did provide good conditions for that early wheat growth.”

In the Pacific Northwest winter wheat is rated 87 percent good to excellent in Idaho, 76 percent good to excellent in Washington and 53 percent good to excellent in Oregon.

Farmers across the U.S. are making good progress in planting spring wheat. At the start of this week 20 percent of the crop had been sown compared to just six percent last year at this time and the five year average for now of fourteen percent.

Nineteen percent of the U.S. corn crop is in the ground now, which compares to the five year average of nine percent.

I’m Bob Hoff and that’s the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on Northwest Aginfo Net.

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