The 2025 Wheat Quality Council’s Hard Winter Wheat Tour across Kansas wrapped up on May 15. During the three days of wheat scouting, tour participants traveled six routes from Manhattan to Colby to Wichita and back to Manhattan. This year’s tour hosted 67 people from 21 U.S. states and six countries in 17 vehicles while traveling across the state. More than half of the attendees were first-time participants.
The three-day average yield for the fields that were calculated was 53 bushels per acre. An estimated 7.4 million acres of wheat were planted in the fall, and USDA NASS estimates 6.9 million acres will be harvested this summer. What Mother Nature has in store for the wheat crop still remains to be seen, but the tour captures a moment in time for the yield potential for fields across the state.
The official tour projection for total production of wheat to be harvested in Kansas is 338.5 million bushels. This number is the average of estimated predictions from tour participants who gathered information from 449 fields across the state. Based on May 1 conditions, NASS predicted the crop to be slightly higher at 345 million bushels, with a yield of 50 bushels per acre.
These fields are still three to eight weeks from harvest. A lot can happen during that time to affect final yields and production.
The story of this year’s tour was Wheat Streak Mosaic Virus complex, which can greatly affect yields, based on the severity of the infection. Some fields showed typical symptoms along the edges of the field, while others had spotty infections and some had the viruses throughout the entire field.
The tour is sponsored by the Wheat Quality Council, which is a coordinated effort by breeders, producers and processors to improve wheat and flour quality. There are several goals of the tour. The first is for participants to make connections within the wheat industry. Another is to describe the wheat at the current point in time, not knowing what will happen over the next few weeks. A third goal is to highlight the agriculture industry.
This year’s tour included 12 producers, 11 members of the grain trade, 18 millers, nine bakers as well as media, university professionals and others involved in the industry. This included flour millers and industry professionals from domestic and international mills and bakeries. U.S. Wheat Associates sponsored six participants who work in flour mills in Central and South America. These grain buyers, flour millers and quality managers were from Mexico, Honduras, Costa Rica and Venezuela. Connecting these customers with Kansas wheat farmers continues to be a highlight of the tour each year.
