Wheat Watch

Farmers spend a lot of time walking their fields and monitoring the growth of their wheat as well as checking for weeds and other pests.  Below is something that a farmer would be looking for when they were checking their fields.  In the middle of the picture is a mustard weed and in the bottom left hand corner there is a weed called cheat grass.  Weeds steal a lot of the sunlight, moisture and nutrients away from the crop that is being grown.  The earlier the weeds are detected and killed the higher the crop yield potential.

Since I've been here about 6 weeks the wheat has grown like crazy.  I took some pictures few weeks ago of the outside of an irrigated wheat field.  My plan is to take some more pictures and post them as the season progresses.

This is a close up view of the wheat:

This is the wheat at a distance:

Farmers don't just spend their time out in the fields, they also spend it watching commodity prices.  Obviously this is important to the farmer because these commodity prices are going to determine the profit, or loss, of their growing season.  Futures markets can also be used by the farmer to lock in prices on their crops before the crops have even been planted.  I plan on doing a post about forward contracting, hedging, and the futures market in general but in the mean time you can view the price of hard red winter wheat at the following website: Frontier Ag

The symbol that we mainly look at is KW2N on the Kansas City Board of Trade.  KW2N is Hard Red Winter Wheat for that will be harvested around July 2012

KC Wheat (KCBT)
Contract	Sym	Prev	Open	High	Low	Last	Chg	Close
HARD RED WIN... May 12	KW2K	635'2	640'4	647'0	633'0	633'0s	-2'2	633'0
HARD RED WIN... Jul 12	KW2N	645'0	653'4	657'0	642'4	642'4s	-2'4	642'4

-Farmer Ryan