By STEVE BINDER

Illinois Correspondent

CARBONDALE, Ill. — Wheat growers in Illinois have shattered yield records the past two years, and it appears they are off to a great start so far for the new season.

About 51 percent of the new crop already had been planted through the first half of last month, mostly in southern Illinois. The progress was well ahead of the state’s five-year average of 40 percent for the same time, according to the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service.

Taking advantage of dry conditions, growers are expected to plant just slightly more acreage than last year, at around 540,000 acres compared to last year’s 520,000.

Not long ago, before corn prices spiked in the mid-2000s, planted wheat acreage in Illinois was four times what it had been the past few years. But since wheat supplies globally skyrocketed, and prices fell below $5 a bushel and remain low, wheat has taken a back seat to soybeans and corn in the state, said Emerson Nafziger, a longtime crop specialist with University of Illinois extension.

“We may be leveling off. But we’re leveling off at a half-million acres,” he said. “Throughout most of our lifetimes, we were at 2 million. This happened with our other crops.

“Oats have almost disappeared. At one time we had more oats in Illinois than wheat. Grain sorghum has never has taken off, and it now hovers around 50,000 to 60,000 acres.”

Washington County grower Devin Clary recently finished planting about 400 acres of wheat, and within a week or so about an inch of rain fell on his land that he said will work wonders getting his crop off to a great start.

“It was the first sustainable rain we’ve had in every bit of five weeks,” he explained. “It was a good amount and fell over a slow period of time. It ought to spike the wheat through and get it off to a good start.”

Wheat remains popular for growers like Clary in southern Illinois in large part because prices these days continue to make double-crop rotations with soybeans better financially than going with corn continuously or alternating between corn and beans, Nafziger said.

And wheat growers are managing their crops well in recent years, he noted, which has led to the record yields of 74 bushels per acre each of the past two years. Illinois growers never had busted the 70 bushel-per-acre total before the 2016 winter wheat crop.

“I talked to people who would normally expect 60-bushel wheat, who exceeded 100 bushels this year,” Nafziger said. “A lot of people in Illinois this year reported the highest wheat yields they’ve ever had.”

While the volume of wheat produced in Illinois has declined recently – 36.8 million bushels this year compared to 73.8 million bushels in 2008 – it nonetheless was up by about 6 percent this year from 2016 totals.