This article was originally posted at 12:17 p.m. CDT on Thursday, May 15. It was last updated with additional information at 4:35 p.m. CDT on Thursday, May 15.

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MANHATTAN, Kan. (DTN) -- On the third and final day of the Wheat Quality Council's 2025 Hard Winter Wheat Tour, crop scouts arrived at an estimated average yield that surpassed anything seen on the tour's last day in the past decade. Yet, when it came to predicting the final production total for the state of Kansas, the group elected to trust their collective gut feeling instead of the numbers they had collected, tempering their final production total.

Scouting on Day 3 of the tour resulted in an average yield of 62.7 bushels per acre (bpa), the highest average of the week. Overall, after scouting 449 fields across the state -- and some into neighboring Nebraska and Oklahoma -- the total weighted average yield for the hard winter wheat tour was estimated at 53 bushels per acre (bpa), a nearly 14% increase from 2024 and the second-highest predicted average in the past 20 years.

But despite the optimism, the tour participants "took the under" when it came to approximating the total size of the Kansas wheat crop, said Dave Green, Wheat Quality Council executive vice president. The group predicted a total harvest of 338.5 million bushels (mb), 6.5 mb less than the 345 mb forecast by USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, based on May 1 conditions.

USDA forecast an average yield in Kansas of 50 bpa, up 7 bushels from 2024, but 3 bpa less than predicted by the wheat tour. Where the Kansas crop will ultimately finish depends largely on the influence of wheat streak mosaic virus and weather conditions as it enters the crucial grain-fill period.

"I did not think disease was the story of this crop; I thought the dryness was," Green said. "There's a lot of fields that look like they need rain pretty quickly. They're still getting ready to set seed, and I think the rain will do them a lot of good. And I assume that it's gonna rain in the next 10 days, and we'll feel a lot better about it."

Green noted that a discussion on the first night of the tour about residual nitrogen -- left behind in many fields due to crop failures during the last few years -- really stuck with him as he assessed the current crop.

"That idea kept coming back to me and made me wonder how much fertilizer is actually out there," he said. "It made me think that this crop is still going to be able to generate a lot more kernels than it looks like it can, so my personal guess (on the size of the Kansas crop) was a little higher because of that."

AREAS WITH POOR CONDITIONS

Some long-running trends were also turned on their head this year, Green said, acknowledging that areas that aren't normally associated with poor conditions, such as north-central and northwest Kansas, were experiencing just that.

"It seems like west-central and southwest Kansas usually have more difficulty getting rain than these other areas," he said. "I was caught off guard a little bit by just how dry it was along that northern route and into Nebraska and then hearing that it was substantially better than people were thinking in the southwest. So, that southern tier is better than most years, and I think that's going to help this crop, while the north-central and northwest are probably a little worse than a typical year."

While drought and disease stole the show during this year's tour, another familiar theme from years past also was evident, even if it wasn't dominating headlines.

"What stands out to me from this year is variability," said Justin Gilpin, CEO of Kansas Wheat. "Not just from the northern portions of the state to the south or from one side of a county to the other, but even within the same field where dryness last fall caused emergence issues."

While fields of "tabletop" wheat could be found, so too, could fields that had more ups and downs from edge to edge than a rollercoaster. Such variability will lead to challenges, especially at harvest, but for many Kansan farmers, having any crop to harvest is a welcome divergence from what they experienced recently.

"We've gone through some challenging years of late, so to see it get back to more of an average crop is encouraging," Gilpin told DTN. "Now we just need to work on getting prices better and more favorable for farmers because we certainly heard that on every stop how challenging things are with the condition of the ag economy right now."

Read more about this year's Hard Winter Wheat Tour from DTN:

Tour preview: https://www.dtnpf.com/…

Day 1 report: https://www.dtnpf.com/…

Day 2 report: https://www.dtnpf.com/…

Jason Jenkins can be reached at jason.jenkins@dtn.com

Follow him on social platform X @JasonJenkinsDTN

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