Extreme #drought, #sawfly infestation cause wheat yields to plummet: CSU scientists are working on strains of drought- and bug-resistant wheat — The #Sterling Journal-Advocate

Click the link to read the article on the Sterling Journal-Advocate website (Jeff Rice). Here’s an excerpt:

Wheat production in northeast Colorado is down by half or more, according to reports from area grain elevators, and experts put the blame on .an exceptionally dry year and an infestation of wheat stem sawfly. Although no hard numbers are yet available – the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s field workers are gathering that information now – reports from elevators in Sterling, Julesburg, Peetz and Haxtun are estimating between 20 and 30 bushels per acre and, in some hard-hit areas, as little as three bushels per acre…

Nationwide, the USDA has projected harvests of around 47 bushels per acre, or about 8 percent less than normal. But here in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, an almost complete absence of moisture has driven that number down even further…

According to the U.S. Drought Monitor released Thursday, northeast Colorado remains in the grip of a severe to extreme drought, wile moderate to severe drought conditions cover most of the rest of the state. The best drought conditions in the state are along the Front Range, where upslope conditions wring water out of moist air moving over the Rockies, although even there it is mostly abnormally dry…

As if the drought wasn’t bad enough, wheat farmers face an old bug with a new appetite. Meyer said wheat stem sawfly has actually been around eastern Colorado since the late 1800s, but kept mostly to hollow-stemmed prairie grasses. The fly lays eggs on grass stems and when the larva hatch, they burrow into the stem and work their way down until the cut the stem off near the ground. Over the past five years, Meyer said, the flies have discovered wheat and increasingly migrated into wheat fields. A tour of area wheat fields by this reporter over the past two weeks showed that some fields showed as much as 50 percent sawfly destruction.