Wheat Scoop: Perspectives on Historically Low Wheat Crop

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A promising wheat crop can change quickly when the rain stops and the temperature climbs.

The 2026 growing season put that reality on full display across Kansas and Oklahoma, providing producers and researchers with lessons on how management, genetics and flexibility can help wheat withstand a season when nearly everything goes wrong.

On the latest episode of the Wheat’s On Your Mind podcast, host Aaron Harries sat down with K-State wheat and forages specialist Romulo Lollato, Ph.D., CSIRO farming systems agronomist John Kirkegaard, Ph.D., and podcast producer Dave Deken (agricultural media professional) for a roundtable discussion examining the 2026 crop and what producers can carry forward into the next growing season.

The Kansas crop entered winter with plenty of potential. Timely fall moisture helped establish wheat in the plains. Above-average temperatures encouraged tillering and root development, leaving the crop in excellent condition by December.

Wheat continued growing through the warmer winter using stored soil moisture. March and April remained dry, as above-average temperatures accelerated crop development. Multiple freezes damaged wheat across the state, followed by hail in May. When rain finally came, much of the crop was too far along to recover lost yield potential and wet conditions prolonged harvest.

For Kansas producers, the difficult season became more than a story about lost bushels. It provided a real-world test of how planting date, variety selection, grazing, nitrogen management and modern wheat genetics can give producers more options when weather changes the potential of a crop.

That contrast was visible throughout the growing season. The same large, well-tillered plants that created optimism in the fall required additional water through the warm winter. By spring, those plants were entering their highest-demand growth stages with less moisture available in the soil profile.

“This last season was, to me, kind of like a season of hope and despair,” said Lollato. “Really, as we got to December, we were in excellent shape, as we hadn’t been in years. From then, it simply became dry.”

Similar challenges played out in Oklahoma, where Deken described tremendous variability between counties and individual fields. From Southern Oklahoma North, yields grew, but very little due to dry conditions and variable temperatures. The Oklahoma Grain and Feed Association reported that the Oklahoma wheat crop came in at half of normal state totals. 

“It was probably the most varied crop I'd ever seen in Oklahoma, because you could go county by county, field by field, and it would be different,” said Deken.  “A lot of the fields and pastures that we had planted were grazed.”

Some producers chose to leave cattle on poor-looking wheat rather than take those fields to grain harvest. The decision highlighted one of the themes that emerged from the discussion: maintaining options can be particularly valuable when yield potential deteriorates.

Kirkegaard saw that flexibility through the lens of Australian wheat production. Wheat and livestock are commonly integrated in Australian systems, allowing producers to graze a crop, cut it for hay or continue toward grain harvest depending on conditions. Earlier planting can also help producers take advantage of stored moisture while creating additional forage.

“Dual-purpose wheat is a really good flexible option with lots of what we call exit options,”  said Kirkegaard. “That's certainly a great tool now for a lot of Australia. Graze it, take it through to grain. If it goes well until September, you might get a graze and then a hay cut. But if you get a year like you guys just got, then our guys will just graze that out.”

Modern wheat genetics provided another layer of resilience. During the 2026 Wheat Quality Council Wheat Tour, Harries and Lollato saw fields where primary tillers had been killed by freeze damage but secondary tillers continued developing and producing heads. Harries noted that grain quality reports also showed respectable test weights despite the stress placed on the crop.

Timely moisture showed just how narrow the difference between a poor crop and a much better one could be. 

“In a water-limited environment, wheat can add roughly 8 bushels per acre of yield potential for each additional inch of water when moisture arrives at the right time and good genetics and agronomic management are already in place,” said Lollato. “A few timely rainfall events in north-central Kansas helped some fields substantially outperform surrounding wheat.”

Those conditions also give researchers an opportunity to evaluate management decisions under the same stresses producers experienced.

One example is nitrogen management. Lollato and his research team are evaluating historical weather and field trial data to estimate the probability of reaching different yield potentials when producers are making nitrogen decisions in February or March. The approach could help producers better match one of their largest input costs with changing yield potential rather than managing solely for the crop they expected when it was established in the fall.

Despite the difficult season, wheat continues to earn its place in Kansas crop rotations through more than grain yield. Lollato pointed to residue production, soil moisture conservation, weed management, rotational diversity and grazing opportunities as reasons he expects Kansas wheat acreage to remain relatively stable. The weather producers face in the next wheat crop will be impossible to control, but the lessons learned in 2026 can help inform the decisions they do control.

Listen to the full Wheat’s On Your Mind episode at wheatsonyourmind.com.