I expect to see a lot of this wheat grazed. The cattle are worth a lot more than the wheat. Miller said the decision to graze will have already been made by wheat growers. March 15 was the date to pull cattle off wheat in the High Plains and they needed to be off by February 15 in Central Texas, he noted. Stripe rust reported On April 11, the Extension agronomist indicated that he had received several disease-related calls from Honey Grove and the McGregor area, in Central Texas.
Stripe rust is the problem.
It's kind of an unusual sort of rust. It prefers this cool, damp weather we've been having. They've also had a big Hessian fly problem in McLennan County. We were there at a field day last week, out at Jason Niemeier's place in the western part of the county, and looked at some wheat that was pretty devastated. If you look at history, how yields have progressed and how prices have progressed, if we were getting the prices now and making the yields we had in the sixties, we couldn't make it.