01/09/06 Wheat losing acres to other crops

Farm and Ranch January 9, 2006 A recent USDA Economic Research Service backgrounder report states that U. S. wheat plantings are about 30 percent lower than in the early 1990s. And one of the reasons is that low returns have led to the substitution of competing crops for wheat particularly on the Plains. Sherman Reese of Oregon, president of the National Association of Wheat Growers, believes that's one of the reasons why his industry needs biotech wheat now. Reese: "We will continue to see lost acreage in the United States due to the fact there are other competing crops that have a biotech availability we don't have and that biotech availability will allow those crops to spread onto acres that heretofore didn't grow them because of the fact they will have a gene for say drought resistance or heat resistance or cold tolerance that will spread those crops further west and further north into the traditional wheat growing areas, particularly the hard red spring wheat growing belt and to a lesser extend the hard red winter belt." Those other biotech crops, like corn and soybeans, might not be applicable to the Pacific Northwest but wheat growers here could see negative repercussions anyway. On the political front. Reese told the Pacific Northwest Grain Conference this fall that if wheat becomes less and less important in say various Plains states, then the congressional delegations of those states may become less supportive of federal government programs that benefit wheat and wheat producers. Tomorrow, more from Reese on why he believes the industry needs to move ahead on biotech wheat. I'm Bob Hoff and that's the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on the Northwest Ag Information Network.