The Biden administration is looking to farmers to help alleviate global food shortfalls by planting winter wheat this fall on ground that’s coming out of the Conservation Reserve Program, but much of the acreage lies in states that are suffering from prolonged drought.
About 1.7 million acres of CRP land are under contracts that expire Sept. 30 and aren’t being renewed by the landowner. That could make it available for planting as soon as this fall if Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack follows through on plans to allow landowners to start preparing the land for planting before the contracts formally expire.
Texas has the largest share of those expiring CRP acres, 300,113 acres, while 111,357 are in Colorado, 90,395 in Kansas and 82,083 in Oklahoma, all states affected to varying degrees by the ongoing drought, according to data obtained by Agri-Pulse.
Those four states accounted for nearly half the U.S. production of winter wheat that was harvested last year.
Recent USDA reports have only heightened concern about U.S. wheat production.
Last week, USDA forecast winter wheat production would drop 8% this year, largely because of the drought, and USDA reported Monday that only 39% of the spring wheat crop had been planted by the end of last week. The five-year average planting pace at this point in May is 67%. Only 17% of North Dakota’s crop and 5% of Minnesota’s spring wheat crop has been planted.
Of the 10 counties with the largest number of acres coming out of CRP, seven are located in Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas and are rated as in either “extreme” drought, which is designated as D3, or “exceptional” drought (D4). More than two-thirds of the 50 counties with the largest amount of acreage leaving CRP are rated in D2 drought or worse.