Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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http://www.denverpost.com/ci_6693006
So much wheat, so few trucks
Vehicle rules eased for bumper crop
By Erin Emery, Denver Post Staff Writer
Article Last Updated: 08/23/2007 12:24:57 AM MDT

Gov. Bill Ritter declared a disaster emergency Wednesday and temporarily
suspended certain motor-carrier laws so farmers can move a record wheat
crop to markets.

Colorado farmers have harvested a blockbuster 87 million bushels of wheat
this year, and it's fetching a record price: $6 per bushel. But there are
not enough properly registered commercial trucks to move it to market.

Ritter suspended for 45 days restrictions on hiring vehicles that have farm
license plates to transport the wheat.

"Thank goodness they've done this," said Kelly Spitzer, a grain
merchandiser for Tempel Grain in Wiley. "We've got 1.8 million bushels of
wheat out on the ground and can't find enough freight to get it moved."

At the company's Haswell site in Kiowa County, a pile of wheat represents
an estimated 400,000 bushels and stands 20 feet high, 100 feet wide and 300
feet long.

The lack of commercial vehicles in Colorado can be blamed on the past six
years of drought, when truckers and rail carriers that served the state's
9,000 wheat farmers went out of business.

"The infrastructure shrinks, and we have a record crop," said Tim Larsen,
sen ior international marketing specialist for the Colorado Department of
Agriculture.

Storage facilities are full because this year's crop is 119 percent bigger
than last year's and one of the best in 10 years, thanks to back-to- back
blizzards in December and January.

But if wheat on the ground gets wet, it spoils.

Much of Colorado's crop will move to Kansas markets. Kansas still must
consent to let Colorado farmers moving wheat in vehicles with farm license
plates enter the state.

"We're waiting to hear what Kansas is going to decide," Spitzer said. "They
need to allow this, or we're still going to have a lot of problems."

Four out of five bushels produced in Colorado are exported to customers in
Mexico, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Colorado farmers produce mostly hard
red winter wheat, the classic wheat used to make bread. The state is now
No. 3 in the production of hard white wheat, a whole wheat that doesn't
taste like whole wheat.

"As you start moving it," said Larsen, "the best thing to do is to move it
downstream, so to speak, into the next distribution point. ... As that
stuff moves, it goes down to the Missouri and Mississippi and gets barged
to an export port."

Colorado needs 86,000 18-wheelers and 22,000 rail cars to move the crop,
Larsen said.

"It's really an emergency situation," said Darrell Hanavan, executive
director of the Colorado Association of Wheat Growers and the Colorado
Wheat Administrative Committee.

The 2007 winter wheat crop is up 30 percent from the 10-year average of
67.5 million bushels.

"To put it in perspective, more than 50 percent of the crop was marketed by
farmers in July, compared with the 10-year average of 17 percent, which
means that there was substantially more wheat that was delivered to
elevators at harvest than normal," Hanavan said. "The result is 10 million
bushels are being stored on the ground."