Latest news with #EmilySchmall
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
'Amber waves of grain' recede in America's heartland as wheat farmers struggle
By Emily Schmall COLBY, Kansas (Reuters) -On a foggy morning in May, Dennis Schoenhals drove a carload of crop scouts around the wheat fields of northern Oklahoma, part of an annual tour to evaluate the health of the crop. But on some fields, Schoenhals and other farmers had already abandoned plans to harvest the grain for sale because prices had sunk to five-year lows. Farmers cut their losses early this year across the U.S. wheat belt, stretching from Texas to Montana. They were choosing to bale the wheat into hay, plow their fields under or turn them over to animals to graze. In Nebraska, wheat acreage is less than half of what it was in 2005. For farmers with crop insurance, damaged or unprofitable wheat fields can still earn revenue. But many agree that chasing insurance payouts is not the best business model. The Great Plains have long been celebrated for the "amber waves of grain" in the popular hymn "America the Beautiful." The region's states produce most of the U.S.-grown crop of hard red winter wheat, favored by bakers for bread. But with prices hovering around $5 per bushel, U.S. wheat farmers have reached an inflection point, with many forced to either lose money, feed wheat to cattle or kill off the crop. Interviews with more than a dozen farmers and analysts across Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma, along with a review of U.S. Department of Agriculture data, revealed a vast disparity in profit for wheat compared to other crops. This has led farmers to abandon more fields before harvest. In parts of the region, prolonged drought has lowered yields in recent years. Farm revenue has also suffered in years with healthy rainfall, as abundant global supplies have weighed on prices. Many have pivoted to corn, soy or livestock, often after generations of their family growing wheat exclusively. "They can't sustain that," said Schoenhals, 68, who raises crops and cattle near Kremlin, Oklahoma, and is president of the state's wheat growers association. "Eventually you either change to other crops if you're able to, or you go out of business," he said. Two years ago, severe drought drove farmers to abandon about a third of the U.S. crop. This year, healthy green stalks shot through the cracked soil, and farmers had expected to harvest the most bushels per acre since 2016. But wheat prices hit a five-year low in May. Every year since 2020, farmers have abandoned between a fifth and a third of the winter wheat crop, U.S. Department of Agriculture data show. Nationwide, corn and soybeans dominate crop fields, with wheat a distant third in planted acreage. Hard red winter wheat exports hit historic lows in 2024 after drought and lower prices in other wheat-producing areas of the world squeezed the U.S. commodity's competitiveness. In Kansas, the leading U.S. producer of hard winter wheat, the disparity between acreage and value is particularly stark. About 1.3 million more farm acres in Kansas were planted with wheat than with corn in 2024, USDA data show, but corn's value of production was more than twice as high. Plentiful global supplies have kept benchmark U.S. prices stuck at lows that discourage farmers from growing wheat, producers and analysts told Reuters. Supplies are so ample that droughts in important grain-growing regions of China and Russia this year have barely budged prices. 'We're below profitable levels for these guys,' said Darin Fessler, an analyst with Lakefront Futures in Lincoln, Nebraska, who grew up on a row crop farm in nearby Sutton. The way things stand, he said, many farmers have "eaten a lot of their own money and burned up working capital. These bankers are going to say: 'show me some profits or we're going to have some farm sales.'" HERITAGE BUT NO PROFIT Ties to wheat farming run deep in the Plains. Historically, European settlers in Kansas struggled to find a foothold until Mennonites from Ukraine arrived with seeds of Turkey Red wheat, a variety that proved able to withstand the area's dry soil, harsh winters and extreme temperature swings. The seeds spread to neighboring Oklahoma and Nebraska, where pioneers established homesteads in the sandy, light earth in which wheat thrived but other crops struggled. Hard red winter wheat has remained the main variety of wheat sown in the U.S. Images of golden stalks adorn hotel lobbies and road signs, and towns include the word in their names. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Willa Cather, a daughter of Red Cloud, Nebraska, wrote a celebrated poem describing "the miles of fresh-plowed soil, heavy and black, full of strength and harshness." Now, U.S. wheat growing is on a steady decline, with farmers finding surer profits from corn, soybeans or cattle. On the wheat quality tour in May, weeks before Nebraska wheat is usually harvested, no wheat could be seen for miles around Red Cloud. When Royce Schaneman joined Nebraska's wheat board 19 years ago, wheat fields stretched for 2.2 million acres across the state. Since then, acreage has shrunk to less than a million acres, he said. In Cheyenne County in southern Nebraska, the state's most productive wheat-growing land, about one in five fields was abandoned this year. "The feeling out in the country is not good," he said. Generations of farmers grew wheat because the crop thrived on rainfall alone. In recent decades, farmers have invested in pricey irrigation systems, experimented with hardier varieties and used fertilizer to improve yields. Agronomists have helped farmers grow more bushels per acre even as climate change has brought more drought and pests. Producers in the southern Plains have experimented with other types of wheat such as durum, the kind used for pasta, and a gluten-free variety, pursuing customers willing to pay more. Profits remain elusive. 'It's heritage, but there's no profit," said Lon Frahm, the CEO of Frahm Farmland, a 40,000-acre operation in Colby, Kansas. Surrounding Thomas County is now dotted with wind farms. Farmers there once grew wheat exclusively, he said, but they have started to diversify due to more frequent drought and global competition depressing prices. Frahm himself now mainly plants corn. He irrigates, fertilizes and harvests the grain using multimillion-dollar machines, then stores it in gleaming, 80-foot steel grain bins. His 7,000 acres of wheat sometimes produce just 5 percent of his farm's total output. "There's certainly profit in corn," he said.
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Chicago celebrates its native son's elevation to pope
By Emily Schmall, Tom Polansek and Christopher Walljasper CHICAGO (Reuters) - The old parish church buildings on Chicago's far South Side where Pope Leo XIV grew up, attended grammar school and launched his career as a priest are now vacated and in disrepair, a victim of the sometimes painful changes within the Roman Catholic Church since he was a boy. Even so, the derelict structures stand as a silent reminder to the new pontiff's deep, longstanding ties to the city and the second-largest Catholic archdiocese in the United States. Former Cardinal Robert Prevost stunned his hometown on Thursday when the Vatican announced that the 69-year-old Chicago native had been chosen as the first U.S.-born pontiff in the 2,000-year history of the Catholic Church. His selection unleashed celebration among Catholics in the Midwestern city and a flurry of questions about the future of his papacy, from how it would shape the divide between church conservatives and liberals to whether he was a fan of the Chicago Cubs or their rivals, the White Sox. 'For Catholics in Chicago, this is somebody who gets us, who knows us, who knows our experience, seeing the closures and the dwindling congregations, and the diminishing Catholic presence in America in general," said Father Michael Pfleger, a priest at St. Sabina Catholic Church on Chicago's South Side known for his political activism. A crowd of clergy and staff members at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago's Hyde Park, where the future pontiff obtained his master's degree in divinity in 1982, erupted in joyful cheers as live television showed Pope Leo walking out onto the Vatican balcony in Rome. "Many of us were just simply incredulous and just couldn't even find words to express our delight, our pride," said Sister Barbara Reid, the president of the theology school. She said the "explosion of excitement" was followed by quiet as the room fell into prayer for the new pope. Reid described Pope Leo as a brilliant intellectual and a person of extraordinary compassion. "It's an unusual blend that makes him a leader who can think critically, but listens to the cries of the poorest, and always has in mind those who are most needy," she said. Lawrence Sullivan, the vicar general for the Archdiocese of Chicago, its 1.9 million Catholics and 216 parishes, said Pope Leo was also a very prayerful and spiritual man. "It's a day of great excitement for Chicago, for the United States to have one of our own be elected as the pope," he said. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, in remarks posted on social media, was more plain-spoken in his exuberance, declaring: "Everything dope, including the Pope, comes from Chicago!" The pope-to-be, by all accounts an exceptional student as a youngster, grew up in the old St. Mary of Assumption parish at the far southern edge of Chicago, attending grade school there and serving as an altar boy. He later studied at the novitiate of the Order of Saint Augustine in St. Louis, according to the Catholic Conference of Illinois, before graduating from Villanova University near Philadelphia in 1977 with a degree in mathematics. He then returned to Chicago to attend divinity school and joined the Augustinian religious order. When he was newly ordained he celebrated mass in his home parish, St. Mary of the Assumption. Since then he has spent the majority of his career overseas, mainly in Peru. His family's parish, situated in a leafy area on the far South Side near the Little Calumet River, has long been shuttered, tattered curtains fluttering in the red brick building's shattered windows. Blocks of clapboard houses and Protestant churches surrounding the church - which closed when the archdiocese consolidated parishes - were quiet on Thursday afternoon. CUBBIES OR SOX? In a goodwill gesture in keeping with the atmosphere of excitement on Thursday, the Chicago Cubs said they had invited the new pope to Wrigley Field to sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," a seventh-inning tradition led by a different celebrity at every home game. The storied Major League Baseball team said they could not confirm that Pope Leo was a Cubs fan. His brother, John Prevost, who lives in New Lenox southwest of Chicago, said the new pontiff was not. Residents of Chicago's South Side tend to favor the Cubs' cross-town rivals, the White Sox. Kevin Schultz, professor of history and Catholic studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said Leo's ascendancy would inject energy and excitement into an archdiocese whose community is defined by an array of ethnicities and languages and is increasingly shaped by migrants from Latin America. "We are in the forefront of the changing dynamic of the church throughout the world, with our increasing number of immigrants constituting a larger and larger percentage of the Catholic population in the archdiocese of Chicago," Schultz said. The rise of the Chicago-born priest to the papacy was not without controversy. In 2023, survivors of clergy sex abuse filed a complaint with the Vatican over Prevost and others after the Chicago-based chapter of the Augustinian order that Prevost once led paid a $2 million settlement over rape accusations by a priest whose name was left off a public list of sex offenders.
