The storms over the weekend brought death, injury and destruction to Oklahoma, but they also brought valuable rain.
Back in the day old-timers might have called them for many locations a “million- dollar rain. “But overall, for Oklahoma agriculture, it might have been a hundred million-dollar rain.
Just playing with the numbers, let’s use wheat, which is in a very critical growth stage. The last two years we have produced a dismal wheat crop—2.5 million acres harvested on average in 2022 and 2023 and yields of just 27 to 28 bushels per acre—total production both years at 68 million bushels. This rain gives us hope for something closer to the 100 million bushels we produced in 2021 when we had a 40-bushel-per-acre crop and 2.7 million acres harvested. I’m not sure it gets us there, but for argument’s sake, let’s say it improved us by a couple of bushels per acre on a statewide basis. And if we use the 2.7 million-acre harvested number and a value of those bushels at the current wheat price of $5.90 a bushel (based on Friday prices), you get added value of over $31 million to wheat farmers.
And there’s lots of value to beef cattle producers where the rains fell, because pasture will improve a lot in the areas that received rain, and there are a lot of ponds that will be full going into May and June (and summer) just because of these rains.
While some spring planted crops might have to be replanted if rains came too hard, the overall impact of this moisture will help tremendously.
Thank you Lord for the rain.