Combines Kansas wheat

I think they're overly optimistic. Here in South Central Kansas the wheat was really hammered but the freeze. It's even worse north and east of here. They always seem to over estimate the yields, then they end up at the KCBOT and give them the estimate.

We got up to 110 mms [ 4.5 inches ] in a couple of locations down in the wheat growing areas in western Victoria down in the bottom south east corner of Australia. However most of the falls were around from the 3 inch mark down to about an inch. [ To put the rain amounts in context. Our average yearly rainfall in our Victorian, South Australian and southern NSW wheat belt ranges from a maximum of 20 inches per year down to 10 inches in parts of SA and north west Victoria. Most of this falls in late autumn," fall " to you, and winter which starts officially on the first of June. ] Certainly enough to get everybody moving on the sowing and with the forecast prospects of reasonable rains ahead for the growing season we may be finally looking at the run of 10 bloody awful dry and drought years coming to an end. A lot of guys will pull the plug if they get a good year and get out as they are so near the edge mentally and financially they just want out! A lot of areas in New South Wales missed out on the big rains and are still waiting for a good opening break rains. The big producing state of Western Australia got some good falls in some areas but I think it is a bit patchy but they will still churn out a lot of grain. Info from the West is not always available here as the distance is the same as from Detroit to los Angeles

We missed out up here in Queensland too R.O.M.Things are starting to get desperate up this way.

Hi Johnboy. In what area of Q are you located againIJ The memory ain't what it used to be! And what is your'e usual start of sowing timeIJ I would have thought you guys would have been well into it or close to finished by now. They are panicking a bit down here in this Horsham area with crop going in all over, about a week or 10 days ahead of the usual starting time. Goes to show what a bit of rain and peer pressure can do when everybody has had a pizzling for the last 10 years! Hope you cop some decent rain real soon. We know just how bad it feels to see others getting good rain while we miss out. Cheers!

our 'normal' soft red winter wheat crop runs 60-85 bu _a. - this year best estimates are for the 42 bu range with a light test wt. The majority of SRW wheat was cut for hay or burnt down and planted in corn or soybeans. Thanks ROM for translating the monkeymeters to inches. I wish the US would go metric ; I am for it every inch of the way! :0)

We all wish the USA would go metric, tbran! and bloody soon. We just can't understand how the world's major power and the leading technological nation of our times is so out of touch with the rest of the world and so stuck in a now obsolete time warp of bushels, pounds, feet, inches and and miles, a time warp that they just don't seem to have the will to pull themselves out of. In Australia, my generation, us old fogies in other words, went through the change over from the imperial to the metric system in the early seventies. Australia didn't mess around. We did it all in one go and got it over and done with. It was well planned and had been planned for years so we knew what was coming and was therefore fairly painless. There was some opposition mostly by the older generation of the time, but not a great deal. As I grew up with the imperial system, I still revert to it quite often but now use mainly metric. It has taken Rolf some 25 years to convert me to using hectares instead of acres but I am getting there! It was fairly easy to convert from bushels to tonnes of grain. After all the world trade in grain is all done in metric tonnes and I now have a lot of trouble converting back to bushels, particularly bus _ acre, when talking to you guys. A major problem we have in some of our industries and aviation is one, is that the american light aircraft are still all imperial measurement based. As a result the apprentices that come from the schools and move into working in these industries have to be completely retrained to used the imperial or obsolete american systems of measurement. One very expensive Mars orbiting satellite that was a cooperative enterprise between the US and Europe was completely lost because the Europeans used the international metric system for their section of the satellite and the Americans, who knows why, persisted in using the old foot _ pounds system. Nor did the Americans tell the Europeans that they were doing this and so the satellite's internal and external communications were incompatible and just did not function when needed. Our currency was changed to the dollar system in the mid 1960's thank goodness. The old english pound system was a nightmare to work out. Cheers!

I agree with ROM. I trained as a mechanical engineer, and the metric system is sooooooo much easier to work with. It is called the metric system, but it should have been called the decimal system. The USA has been using the decimal system for its money since time immortal: trust me, the "metric" system of weights and measures is as easy compared to the imperial system as the dollar is to the old pounds shillings and pence. PS I went through all the changes in Australia as did ROM, and as he says, it was painless.

R.O.M, we are on the Darling Downs,Dalby to be exact and it is still dry. Gums that were growing before I was born are dying on the farm so that gives you an idea of how dry it is.There was a thin strip on one side of the town that got some rain to plant summer crops and received follow up falls but most of us just watched another season go by. Next year.

Check out the other web site for their new world location map. If you put yourself "on the map", then everyone can find out where you are in the world. - very clever.