Drought pushing many Nebraska wheat farmers to abandon their acres this year

Nebraska’s winter wheat farmers could be abandoning much of their crop this year due to one of the most devastating droughts on record.

In the most recent update last week from the National Drought Mitigation Center, nearly 10% of the state is now in “exceptional” drought, the most severe classification on the drought monitor scale. That’s more than doubled from 4% recorded in the first week of May.

The two areas of exceptional drought in the Panhandle and in southwestern Nebraska both widened last week. What started as exceptional drought in much of Morrill County has now spread to encompass Morrill, Garden, Grant and Arthur counties. Parts of Scotts Bluff, Banner and Cheyenne counties are also included in the worsening area.

The other area of exceptional drought in southwestern Nebraska only sat in the corners of Lincoln, Dawson, Frontier and Gosper counties last week, but in the Thursday update, the National Drought Mitigation Center increased the area to include much of Dawson County, a growing area of Lincoln County, most of Frontier County and nearly half of Gosper County.

Many of these areas are home to Nebraska’s winter wheat crop – the state’s third-largest field crop export behind corn and soybeans. In 2023, the state’s wheat production drew in $255 million from 880,000 acres harvested The state exported around $124 million in winter wheat in 2023. It’s an important crop for bread and flour production but also has important ag uses such as cattle feed. Nebraska mostly raises hard red winter wheat, but it’s also one of a few states that also grows hard white wheat.

Those numbers are expected to dramatically drop this year when Nebraska farmers harvest. The USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service predicted this month that 580,000 acres will be harvested. That’s about 225,000 acres lower than last year’s harvest. Eighty-five percent of wheat acres were harvested last year, but only 64% is expected to be harvested in 2026.

Very dry conditions throughout the winter and several sudden freezes damaged quite a few wheat fields earlier this year, according to Nebraska Extension. Dryland cropping specialist Amanda Easterly said the intermittent freezes after a warm period stressed the crops at a critical time when wheat was booting and heading, which are important reproductive phases for the crops.

The latest crop report from the USDA shows 0% of Nebraska’s wheat crop right now is in excellent condition. Only 5% is in “good” condition; 13% is in “fair” condition; 45% is in “poor” condition; and 37% is in “very poor” condition.

The Panhandle Research Extension and Education Center said the University of Nebraska’s High Plains Ag Lab in the Panhandle will likely lose many of its fields. The wheat field site in Scotts Bluff County, which is now in exceptional drought, has already been shut down after the irrigation district there chose to delay beginning irrigation until July. It’s a similar choice made by other irrigation districts that will face very small windows of surface water irrigation this year.

“We are staring at what I believe may be the biggest winter wheat crop disaster the country has seen in decades,” Eric Hunt said in NU Extension’s latest drought update. “Judging by what I hear from extension educators out west, there won’t be much winter wheat harvested in the Panhandle, and the situation in southwestern Nebraska is getting to that point for some too.”

It’s pushing many Nebraska farmers to consider abandoning their wheat fields for the year. The USDA is predicting nearly 36% of wheat fields won’t be harvested this year. It’s not as high as some other states, such as Texas, where wheat abandonment has topped 70%. But total wheat field abandonment nationwide is averaging around 32% for the season, which currently sits as the fourth-highest rate since 1917. The two other highest years were 33.1% in 2023 and 32.3% in 1933, according to the USDA.

NASS predicted last week that total U.S. winter wheat production could top 1.05 billion bushels – down 25% from 2025. Hard red winter wheat is predicted to fall 36% to 515 million bushels this year. The season-average price is estimated to sit around $6.50 a bushel, which has sharply started ticking back up after falling below $5 at the end of 2025.

What the Wheat Quality Council saw up close in this year’s Hard Winter Wheat Tour throughout several Great Plains states also painted a bleak picture in Nebraska.

“We’re expecting maybe upwards of 50% crop loss, and it’s changing day by day as the effects of all these things compound, and we see the results of those,” Nebraska Wheat Board’s Royce Schaneman told the Progressive Farmer last week.

Schaneman said eastern sides of Nebraska and Kansas showed “a couple nice pockets where the wheat crop looked pretty good, pretty solid.” But that deteriorated as they moved west to survey the wheat fields.

“The farther west we came, you could really tell that it was getting a lot drier. The wheat was a lot shorter, some unevenness, and those yields really started to tail off. And we saw pretty, pretty strong yields in the east, maybe some 70-bushel wheat, but then as we came west, I think the lowest we saw was right around 20 bushel per acre,” Schaneman said.