FARGO, ND — About 40 wheat scouts assembled on the eve of the 2024 Hard Spring & Durum Wheat Tour were told they would likely see a large crop thanks to plentiful precipitation during the growing season to date. At the same time, some North Dakota wheat fields were likely to show signs of disease due to excessive moisture.

Scouts registered for the annual tour represent businesses across the wheat value chain, including growers, elevator operators, traders, millers and bakers, along with representatives from government, academia and the media. Tour participants include a mix of veteran wheat scouts and those participating for the first time.

Scouts took part in an orientation led by former miller Brian Walker of BW Consulting, who outlined the plan for the week. Ten vehicles with four scouts apiece were to set to depart Fargo early July 23 following one of six color coded routes across the southern tier of North Dakota. The purple route extends further south into northeast South Dakota. Approximately every 10 to 15 miles, scouts will stop at a wheat field, avoiding crops inside fences, those posted “no trespassing” and fields where growers have opted out according to a smartphone app designed for that purpose.

Once in a field, scouts will make a visual appraisal and take a series of measurements, including row spacing, plant height, heads per foot and spikelets per head. Once back in the vehicle, scouts will average their findings from across the field and plug the numbers into a formula devised by Duane Berglund, a North Dakota State University extension agronomist, to generate a bushels-per-acre yield estimate for the field. At the end of the day, each car will take a simple average of the fields visited that day, which then will be averaged across all cars and routes by tour statistician Rita Ott of General Mills, Minneapolis.

Because the tour follows established routes each year, year-over-year comparisons are made for each color-coded route and for each day of the tour.  The first day takes scouts from Fargo to Bismarck. Day 2 will see participants take six circuitous routes from Bismarck to Devil’s Lake. The final half-day will allow most participants to tour a flour mill during a break from measuring fields from Devil’s Lake back to Fargo, including some along the fertile Red River valley in western Minnesota. The full tour average will be calculated during the final crop discussion on July 25 at the Northern Crops Institute on the North Dakota State University campus.

The spring wheat tour in 2023 forecast an average yield of 47.4 bus per acre, which compared with 45 bpa as the Aug. 1, 2023, forecast from the USDA’s North Dakota Field Office and 48.5 as that office’s final average yield after harvest. The average spring wheat tour yield from the past 30 years (29 tours due to the pandemic-canceled 2020 tour) is 39.2 bpa, which compared with 38.6 bpa as the 30-year average Aug. 1 forecast from the USDA and 39 bpa as the 30-year average USDA final yield.

Expectations were that scouts could see a very large crop coming out of two consecutive drought years. The USDA on July 12 in its first survey-based estimate of the season for spring wheat forecast production of spring wheat other than durum in the United States this year at 578 million bus, up 14% from 505 million bus in 2023. If the forecast holds, the 2024 other spring wheat crop would be the largest since 588 million bus in 2020 and would compare favorably with 493 million bus as the recent five-year average outturn.