The USDA provides a major "data dump" on Friday morning, February 8th, as most of the reports that were due in January and did not happen because of the partial government shutdown were released on Friday morning- along with data that was due in February originally. The one exception was the January WASDE report from the Economic Research Service- they offered some guidance from January as they provided a fresh WASDE based on February data.
One of the reports most important to Oklahoma and their southern plains neighbors, Kansas and Texas, was the winter wheat and canola seedings report. The key numbers were the hard red winter wheat seedings for those states as winter wheat seedings overall ended up down four percent from a year ago.
The Winter Wheat Seedings in total of 31.29 million acres was the lowest on record since 1909. Top-grower Kansas planted 7.2 million acres, down from 7.7 million last year, down six percent while Oklahoma dropped another 200,000 acres compared to a year ago at 4.2 million seeded this past fall and now in the ground. Texas is flat on year at 4.5 million, surpassing Oklahoma in winter wheat acres by 100,000.
In total, the hard red winter wheat acreage number is called 22.2 million acres for the current crop in the ground, down three percent from a year ago- Besides Oklahoma and Kansas losing wheat acres, Nebraska shows a total of 930,000 acres- down 15% from a year ago and a record low acreage number, according to USDA.
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