Wheat Crop Disaster
Worst Since 1917
Stressed Wheat Produces Only a Single Grain
Dixon Palmer, a six-foot-two Kiowa warrior in a Cowboy hat, is the only man in Caddo County whose winter wheat isn’t failing. Caddo County, east of Kiowa County, is one of the top five wheat producing counties in Oklahoma. On the way to one of Dixon’s fields, we pass cattle turned out to graze on what Dixon calls 50 mile an hour wheat — a crop that only looks good when you're whipping past it in a pickup truck at 50 miles an hour. Other fields of 50 mile an hour wheat have already been cut for hay, their hulls empty, bearing only one grain, evidence of the dust bowl-level drought that's ravaged western Oklahoma over the past couple of years. Stressed wheat produces just one seed, a single grain, the plant’s primary purpose being reproduction. Stressed wheat is worthless wheat. There is, at the moment, a lot of stressed wheat in Oklahoma being baled up into hay or eaten by free-range Oklahoma beef cattle. They call this “abandoning” the field; you know the wheat you harvest isn’t …
