‘It’s very tough to make a living’: Lowest wheat prices in years complicates Washington’s return-to-normal harvest

The rolling hills of the Palouse are buzzing this time of year.

Like caterpillars to a tomato plant, combines are chewing through the amber fields of winter and spring wheat that cover large swathes of one of the nation’s premier growing regions. More than half of the state’s acreage for winter wheat and around 20% of the spring wheat was already harvested when last week began, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The USDA is predicting an average to above average harvest in Washington this year, around 146 million bushels as of July, which is welcome news to those wheat growers who’ve had to contend with drought, extreme heat and subsequent low yields in recent years.

But just like their crop, new challenges have come to a head for those growers.

The market for their commodity, one of the state’s top three agricultural products, is at its lowest point since before the Russian invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago. At the same time, those growers say their costs have only gone up.

The price per bushel dropped below $6 this summer for the first time in three years. As of June, bushels are going for $5.86, down from $7.67 a year ago and nearly half the record high of $10.99 in 2022 spurred by the Russia-Ukraine conflict, both key world leaders in wheat production.

“The prices are well below the cost of production right now,” said fifth-generation wheat grower Terry Harding. “It’s very tough to make a living at this price point.”

Harding has helped manage his family farm in Lincoln County since the early 2000s, but his forefathers have tended the land since 1872 – 17 years before Washington became a state. They grow other grasses and grains, but dryland wheat is the bulk of their operation.

Wheat prices were already on the rise ahead of the invasion, due to the pandemic-induced demand and Russian advances on Ukraine that made it clear the invasion was imminent. Both events greatly affected the international market, and with roughly 90% of Washington’s wheat ending up overseas each year, that impacted growers across the state – for better and worse.

While growers benefited from the increased value of their crop, Harding said the costs for things like fertilizer, herbicides and fuel rose alongside them and haven’t come down much.

“We’re cutting costs everywhere we can,” Harding said. “Trying to save those pennies anywhere we can.”

The downturn since the spike, which may be due to both Russia’s and Ukraine’s return to the international market, means farmers are feeling the pressure nationwide. Younger, low-income and new-to-the-industry farmers likely will be most affected, said Casey Chumrau, chief executive officer of the Washington Grain Commission.

Growers will need to weigh their options, considering their needs and the state of the market, to determine if they’ll take their harvest immediately for some much-needed cash, sit on their harvest until the market rebounds or file an insurance claim. Chumrau said it will vary farm by farm, depending on individual needs and circumstances.

“Young farmers that are just getting in, or they’ve bought out their parents or something like that, a lot of times they are still paying off loans for equipment, for land, maybe they’re leasing land, so they’re going to have those higher overhead costs that need to be covered,” Chumrau said. “Whereas, if you’re more established, and you’ve been able to work longer and pay off some of those things, then the economics works out differently.”

The inability to break even is stressing even established growers like Marci Green, who cultivates bluegrass, wheat, canola, lentils, malt barley and more on her family homestead Green View Farms near Fairfield. She does so alongside her husband Lonnie Green, and their sons Jordan and Derek Green, now the seventh generation to work the land.

Green said she is expecting some bountiful harvests and will store some on her property until prices rebound. She’ll need to take some of that grain to market immediately to secure cash flow. She doesn’t think she’ll be able to hold on to what she’s storing for long before the budget tightens again.

“We’ll store some, but we’re probably talking months,” Green said. “We won’t be holding it for a year. We won’t be holding it for six months, even.”

Weather-induced complications, again

Harding said every year brings new challenges, and this year, the weather wiped out about 25% of his winter and spring wheat crops, both named based on the time of year they’re planted.

Winter wheat is planted in the fall, and lays dormant most of the winter using snow cover as insulation from high winds and temperature fluctuations. That snowfall was limited on Harding’s farm, and some of his planted fields never really got off the ground.

Harding replanted those fields with spring wheat earlier this year, but a cold snap at the end of May left many of those replacement plants damaged by frost.

“If it’s at the right stage of growing, and you get a frost, it can do some real damage,” Harding said.

Harding and his neighbors weren’t the only ones hit with frost this year: Farmers in Yakima and Klickitat counties also lost spring wheat to the cold, said Michelle Hennings, executive director of the Washington Association of Wheat Growers.

Hennings noted that Washington’s wide range of climates means growers have had to deal with different weather complications or successes on essentially a county by county basis. While some areas were adversely affected by the cold, others were struck by last month’s three-week stretch of extreme highs.

In central Washington, growers are recuperating from the 2021 drought conditions that led to the lowest statewide yield in nearly 60 years. Washington growers produced 87.1 million bushels, roughly half the amount of the year before.

Production has since rebounded, growing to 144 million bushels in 2022 before falling last year to 113 million bushels. Hennings said it likely will take years for the soil to rebound in areas most affected by the drought, like Benton County.

“They just aren’t receiving the rainfall needed to start to recover from the drought we had,” Hennings said of the county, and drier areas like it. “It was terrible. It just takes time for the soil to recover from that.”

Whitman County, which leads the state and the nation for wheat production, is expected to carry the load this year. Hennings said those on the Palouse managed to avoid some of the weather complications other Washington growers are grappling with and are expecting a plentiful crop.

As of July 1, the USDA predicted an increase statewide in both winter and spring wheat production of around 30%, for an expected total of 146 million bushels.

Green hopes her and her family can get their plentiful crop harvested before any extreme weather events get in the way, something she’s had some experience with. She lost some of her fields in their entirety to an August 2022 storm that brought golf-ball-sized hail, heavy rains and whipping winds to parts of Eastern Washington, causing significant crop damage just before harvest.

“It’s looking to be a decent crop, now we just hope and pray that all the growers stay safe and we avoid any field fires, storms or accidents with equipment or anything,” she said.