Seeding plans may be scaled back in the U.S. breadbasket despite historically high prices for this time of year, reflecting rising global demand and thin world wheat supplies projected to end the 2022-23 marketing year at a six-year low. The tight supplies have been exacerbated as the conflict in Ukraine has disrupted grain exports from the Black Sea region.

The drought threatens Kansas, the top winter wheat growing state, and Oklahoma in two ways: discouraging farmers who have not yet planted from trying, while threatening crops already in the ground from developing properly.

“It’s sort of a grim situation,” said Kent Winter, who farms in Andale, Kan., outside Wichita. He said he normally seeds by mid-October but has yet to plant any wheat this year.

If rain does not fall in the next 10 days, he will begin “dusting in” the crop and hoping for moisture. Final seeding dates to receive full crop insurance coverage are approaching, ranging from Oct. 15 in northwest Kansas to Nov. 15 in the southeast.

Without moisture, wheat shoots may fail to emerge from the ground. Even a delayed emergence would threaten yield potential by narrowing the window for plants to develop a hardy root system and push out more stems, known as tillers, before winter.

“That puts a nail in the coffin,” said Mark Hodges, an agronomist for Plains Grains Inc, an Oklahoma-based group that tests wheat for quality. Hodges said, “If you don’t have the tillers in the fall, it’s really hard to make up that number in the spring.”

Fears of a supply squeeze are underscored by the July Kansas City wheat futures contract trading around $9.40 a bushel, the highest price on record for a new-crop July contract at this time of year, the thick of the fall planting season.

About two-thirds of wheat in the U.S., among the top five global exporters, is grown as a winter crop rather than spring.

While Plains farmers would like to take advantage of high prices, the dry weather may discourage producers from committing to supplies of high-priced seeds and fertilizer.

As a result, Justin Gilpin, chief executive of the Kansas Wheat Commission, expected the number of Kansas wheat acres planted for harvest in 2023 to remain steady with the 7.3 million acres seeded for 2022.

Winter concurred. “With the price of wheat, a lot of operators were planning to at least match or even up their acres for this coming year. But this drought is having a huge influence on plans,” he said.

Poor emergence could have a longer-term cost as well. Wheat helps anchor topsoil in the Plains, protecting it from wind erosion.

“No farmer wants to see his ground blowing. So you go ahead and plant wheat, and hope like heck you get it up before winter comes,” said Martin Kerschen, who farms in Garden Plain, Kansas.

Wheat is a famously hardy crop that can bounce back from struggles with poor weather. But forecasts are for drought to persist in the southern Plains through December.

In Kansas, 27 per cent of the state is in “exceptional drought,” the most extreme category, and virtually the entire state is abnormally dry, according to the latest weekly U.S. Drought Monitor report prepared by a consortium of climatologists.

A key driver of the drought is the La Nina weather phenomenon, which tends to favour warm and dry conditions in the Plains. The current La Nina is in its third year.

— Julie Ingwersen is a Reuters commodities correspondent in Chicago.

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Many of the grass fires grew rapidly on Monday due to dry weather and parched prairie land in the Texas Panhandle, north and western Oklahoma and southern Kansas. Several of the blazes were largely contained on Thursday as hundreds have battled the blazes on the ground and in the air.

Six people have been killed in the fires, including three ranch hands in Texas who died trying to protect cattle from oncoming flames. The fires in Kansas were the largest recorded, at about 631,000 total acres, state officials said.

Many ranchers have not yet been able to return to their land but those who did have seen the loss of herds and destruction of fencing, officials said.

“Unfortunately, it (cattle loss) has been in the thousands, but there is not a specific number on the amount of cattle that have been killed,” Katie Horner, an emergency management spokeswoman in No. 3 cattle state Kansas, said in a social media post.

In Texas, the top U.S. cattle producer, losses were also expected to be large, officials said.

The losses are not having an impact on cattle futures or prices of cattle ready for slaughter. Texas has 12.3 million head of cattle, followed by 6.45 million in Nebraska and 6.4 million in Kansas, according to U.S. cattle inventory data.

Two wildfires that burned through about 164,000 acres in the Texas Panhandle were 100 per cent contained on Thursday, and the largest blaze, the so-called Perryton fire of about 318,000 acres, was 75 per cent contained, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service.

The Perryton fire is the third-largest recorded in Texas, it added.

The National Weather Service canceled a critical fire risk warning for the Texas Panhandle into Oklahoma, Kansas and western Missouri it had issued on Wednesday, saying a weak low pressure front was in the area, bringing moisture to the air.

In Oklahoma, two ranches in Woodward County lost about 200 head of cattle total and a hog farm operation lost several thousand animals in the wildfires, Luke Kanclerz, spokesman for the Oklahoma Forestry Services said. He added the number will climb when damage can assessed in other places.

— Reporting for Reuters by Jon Herskovitz; additional reporting for Reuters by Heide Brandes in Oklahoma City and Theopolis Waters in Chicago.

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The bill approved by the Oklahoma Senate on Tuesday and already approved in the House increases fines for cattle theft and the number of felony counts that can be brought.

State law currently says the penalty for livestock theft is jail or a fine, but the legislation would allow for both penalties in a single case. It also allows prosecutors to assign a felony charge for each animal stolen.

“If a thief steals eight head of cattle, in the past he was charged with one felony count,” said Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association executive vice-president Michael Kelsey.

The crime has evolved from rustlers on horseback driving their plunder across the range, often portrayed in the early 1960s U.S. TV program Rawhide, to modern-day cowboys using pickup trucks and trailers to make off with cattle.

The recent rise in rustling is driven by the spread of heroin and methamphetamines to rural areas, an issue that has dogged states across the nation. In Oklahoma and neighbouring Texas, lonesome cattle grazing on thousand-acre ranches that can fetch about $1,000 to $3,000 at market are proving to be easy targets for rustlers on the down and out (all figures US$).

Jail time for the theft of livestock remains at three to 10 years. Those convicted of livestock theft would be fined in an amount that is three times the value of animals and machinery stolen, capping out at $500,000.

The bill now heads to Governor Mary Fallin, a Republican.

“Now, district attorneys have the option to seek eight felony counts. If the district attorney is faced with a hardened criminal, he can really throw the book at him,” Kelsey said.

Among Oklahoma cattle thieves, about 75 per cent are doing so to feed drug addictions, most often to methamphetamines, according to Jerry Flowers, chief agent for the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture’s Investigative Services, a specialized units farm crimes.

Cattle theft data from the department showed that reported cattle thefts more than doubled in 2014 from the previous year, due in large part to rampant methamphetamine use and addiction in rural areas.

— Reporting for Reuters by Heide Brandes; writing by Jon Herskovitz.

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Wheat futures pared early gains on technical selling, keeping prices below the more than one-month peaks reached last week. Corn and soybeans each reversed from narrow losses at the Chicago Board of Trade, rallying amid strength in wheat.

K.C. HRW wheat for May delivery finished 5-1/4 cents, or about 1.2 per cent, higher at $4.74-3/4 per bushel while CBOT May wheat was up 3-1/2 cents at $4.66-1/2 (all figures US$).

As much as 20 per cent of the wheat crop was significantly damaged from freezing temperatures over the weekend in southwestern Kansas and western Oklahoma, INTL FCStone analyst Arlan Suderman said in a note to clients.

Drought was developing in that portion of the Plains, with moderate drought conditions in most of Oklahoma’s “panhandle,” leaving plants more at risk of freeze damage than fields with protective snow cover or more significant soil moisture reserves.

“Unfortunately, it will take time to assess the scope of the damage,” Suderman said. “Wheat tillers lost due to a freeze in March can be replaced, albeit with lower-producing tillers.”

CBOT May soybeans were up 4-1/2 cents at $9.02 per bushel, gaining for a third straight session and hovering near Friday’s 3-1/2-month high of $9.04-3/4. The contract was hitting upside resistance at its 200-day moving average after reaching the key technical indicator for the first time since August last week.

CBOT May corn notched its highest settlement since Feb. 22, rising 2-1/2 cents to $3.69-1/2 per bushel and rebounding from the earlier one-week low of $3.65-3/4.

Soybeans and corn fell overnight, pressured in part by U.S. regulatory data released after the close of trading on Friday showing speculative investors dumping big volumes of their short, or bearish, bets on the commodities.

“Ongoing short-covering is a primary source of support for the market, but we are also seeing strength from weather outlooks,” MaxYield Cooperative analyst Karl Setzer said in a note.

— Michael Hirtzer reports on agriculture and ag commodity markets for Reuters from Chicago.

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Blumenort resident Amy Ginn gets a rush of adrenalin every time she hears it — especially when it goes off in the middle of the night.

“It does get your attention when it goes off at 3 a.m. that’s for sure,” she says. “You have to run and see what’s going on.”

In 2010, Steinbach was recruiting extra pairs of eyes to watch the sky — and ground — to pilot a new Environment Canada program for improved severe weather preparedness. Ginn put up her hand and became one of 24 weather spotters with the city’s Storm Ready program, the first and only of its kind in Canada. She and others were trained in forecasting terminology, cloud and storm identification, how to report severe weather and how to read supplied radar information and computer weather maps.

From May’s beginning to October, Ginn’s job is to be occasionally on call, with her two Environment Canada radios on 24/7, and ready to spring to action if they start their ‘whoop, whoop, whooping.’ When they do, she’ll first check her computer to see where trouble is brewing, then, if it’s daylight, jumps in her car and heads out to eye the sky.

“If we do get something severe like a funnel cloud we’ll report to the team captain and then the team captain calls Environment Canada,” she said. “We’re reporting what type of severe weather we’re visually experiencing on the ground, and then Environment Canada is able to send our warnings for the affected areas.”

Steinbach’s Storm Ready spotters, who all reside within a 10-km radius of the southeastern Manitoba city, provide a critically important service to the region, providing extra pairs of human eyes to spot specific and localized weather action before it shows up on radar. A grassroots program like this helps improve the timeliness of warnings as well as clear recommendations for local events that alert emergency personnel for necessary action as well.

“It gives you one more thing to add to your emergency preparedness,” says Denis Vassart, municipal emergency co-ordinator for Steinbach and the RM of Hanover.

The touchdown of an F5 tornado in Elie, Manitoba on June 22, 2007 was the catalyst to try such a program by Environment Canada and Steinbach was willing to test this on-call volunteer storm-spotter program called ‘Storm Ready.’

Steinbach’s ‘Storm Ready’ designation actually comes from the U.S. National Weather Service based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, explains Nicki Albus, a regional emergency manager with EMO Manitoba.

That program began south of the border in 1998 in the U.S. as officials saw a need to improve, organize and certify weather preparedness and improve the alert given residents in times of severe weather.

“It’s another way to make communities accountable for their own severe weather preparedness,” said Albus.

The slow-motion devastation of flooding has focused officialdom for the last while, but the need for programming that enhances preparedness in severe weather isn’t going away.

Many Manitobans were reminded during the early summer of 2007 how devastating severe storms can be, when, the day after Elie was hit, tornadoes also touched down near Carman, Oakville, Pipestone, the Canupawakpa Dakota Nation, between Hartney and Deloraine, Pelican Lake and the Baldur and Belmont-Pleasant Valley areas.

One farm family near Baldur was lucky to escape with their lives that weekend, when 330 km/h winds completely destroyed their home, barns and bins, flattened acres of surrounding bushland and left tractors and other farm equipment mangled and flipped.

In July 2013, Pipestone was hit again with high winds that destroyed its rink, and took out trees throughout the village.

The Meteorological Service of Canada issues watches, warnings and advisories through radio and television stations, the Weather Office Website, automated telephone information lines and Environment Canada’s Weather radio when severe storms are on the horizon.

But having human eyes on the sky improve the warning of a storm coming right at a localized area, says Vassart. For now Steinbach’s volunteer eyes-on-the-sky program remains a pilot, but other municipalities show considerable interest in starting their own up, he said. He regularly takes calls asking how the program in Steinbach is organized, he said.

“They ask how to get it going,” he said. “I’m expecting we’ll see some growth (across Manitoba) to it in the next year.”

Albus said Manitoba’s Emergency Measures Organization and Environment Canada are working on how to expand it.

“We hope to be the first province to expand it in co-operation with Environment Canada and we’re working on that. We’re certainly looking at a Storm Ready or Storm Ready-type sort of verification or certification program that our communities can use.

“It becomes a hot topic every time severe weather comes through,” she added.

Which could be any time soon.

Bob Ticknor, a team captain with the Steinbach program, is starting to wait and watch for what 2015 brings. He’s seen his share since taking up his volunteer post in 2011. He called in that severe downpour that hammered Steinbach last summer.

“We’ve never had to report a tornado or anything like that,” he said. “But I have reported suspicious-looking clouds and that kind of thing. Usually in those cases, Environment Canada has already issued a tornado watch or warning so people are aware of it.”

Storm Ready programs don’t make any place storm-proof, he said. But they can mean fewer fatalities and property damage if people have as early a warning as possible.

“Environment Canada has its radar and its weather stations and stuff like that,” said Ticknor. “But sometimes you need the person on the ground to say what is happening too.”

May 3 to May 9 is Emergency Preparedness Week, a nationwide event that tries to increase awareness about being prepared for many different emergencies that can affect individuals and communities.

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