His trip to Montana lets him know in advance what will be showing up on Japanese docks early next year. Farmers and grain companies in the Northwest are particularly interested in demonstrating the high quality of their wheat this year, when Japan enters the last part of phasing in tighter standards for excess materials in their wheat. As of January, Japan will accept wheat that has no more than 0.5 dockage. The tightening of the dockage standard, ratcheted down from 0.7 percent last year, helps put U.S. wheat in line with the cleaning standards that some other countries already are using. Because of Japan's new standards, grain companies in Montana increasingly are discounting what they pay farmers if there is much excess material in the wheat they harvest.
Wheat coming into elevators is generally much cleaner than it was just two years ago.
Consolidation means the big elevators now handle the lion's share of traffic. Although they account for only 25 percent of the 425 line elevators in North Dakota, the big facilities collectively handle about 60 percent of the commodities and account for half of the off-farm grain storage. As of the end of May, Minnesota farmers had taken 135,000 acres out of conservation and placed them back into production. The acreage accounts for 7.4 percent of the state's 1.9 million CRP acres. Second to Minnesota were Iowa farmers who took nearly 97,000 acres out of reserve, followed by North Dakota, which took nearly 58,000 acres out.