Northeast North Dakota wheat condition pretty good despite dry season

LANGDON, N.D. — The wheat crop at Langdon Research Extension Center is in pretty good condition despite less-than-ideal weather conditions.

A blizzard that dropped 13 inches of snow on the center’s plots on April 21, 2023, delayed spring planting until the end of May, then weather conditions turned dry, said Randy Mehlhoff, Langdon Research Extension Center director.

The center has received only two rains since the wheat was planted.

“We just finished with July, and we’ve had one-half inch of moisture,” Mehlhoff said on July 31, 2023.

Rains in Cavalier County, where LREC is located, have been spotty, with farms within five miles of the center receiving 2 inches more this summer than the center did, Mehlhoff said. Overall, though, wheat field conditions in the county, like across most of northeastern North Dakota are dry, which has reduced yields.

The moisture that delayed spring planting turned out to be beneficial to the wheat.

“We did get a little later start, but we got the seeds into moisture,” Mehlhoff said.

Small grains like wheat are root crops, and the hard red spring wheat plots he planted at the center developed a good root system that helped sustain it when the weather turned dry.

Mehloff estimates the wheat will yield 50- to 60-bushels per acre, which is about average for Langdon Research Extension Center production.

Mehlhoff expects that wheat yields in other parts of Cavalier County will be similar.

While the dry conditions resulted in an average wheat crop instead of a bumper one, it also reduced disease pressure, similar to other wheat states that are dry.

“Just last week, I talked to a USDA rust pathologist, and he is looking for rust in Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota, and he is having very much trouble finding it, so that’s good,” Mehlhoff said.

Hoever, the dry conditions have spawned a couple of insects that could cause yield reductions.

Green aphids were plentiful in the Langdon Research Extension Center wheat in late July, and Mehlhoff expected them to also be in the soybean plots later this summer.

The species of cereal aphids that migrate into North Dakota are the English grain aphid, which is most common on wheat heads, and the bird cherry oat aphid is typically on the underside of leaves in the lower canopy, said Janet Knodel NDSU Extension entomologist. Occasionally, there also are green bug aphids, she said.

The aphids in the Langdon Research Extension Center wheat plots, which most likely were bird cherry oat and English grain aphids, damage the grain head by drinking the wheat sap, which reduces yields and causes reduction in test weight.

Cereal aphid populations were increasing across North Dakota at the end of July in late-planted wheat and barley, Knodel said

The NDSU Integrated Pest Management field scouts observed cereal aphids on 31% of the 21 wheat fields they scouted.

About 23% of the wheat fields in northeast North Dakota in Cavalier County and Ramsey County and Steele, Wells, Foster and Griggs counties in east-central North Dakota had economic populations of cereal aphids, according to the IPM crop scouts.

Knodel advises growers to continue scouting fields up until the early dough stage of wheat.

The economic threshold for complete heading through the end of anthesis is four to seven aphids per stem. The threshold from the end of anthesis through the medium milk stage is eight to 12 aphids per stem, and the threshold for medium milk through the early doubt stage is 12 aphids per stem, Knodel said.

Besides the cereal aphids that were in the Langdon Research Extension Center test plots, Mehlhoff anticipated that there is potential for grasshopper damage during the last month of the wheat's development.

Harvest of the wheat test plots likely will begin in early September.