wheat

Golden slopes full of soft, white wheat roll and dive down along the snakey, Snake River – just out of Windust in southeastern Washington.A farmer rolls a…

(Runtime 4:00)Scout Clean Energy, a renewable energy companyfrom Colorado, began looking at Horse Heaven Hills in 2016 as the prospective site for a clean…

Northwest farmers are pouring on the water to moisten soils ahead of the triple-digit temperatures and possible record highs expected this weekend.

Some stunted wheat fields won’t see the combine this summer. Cattle operators are severely cutting back their herds for lack of grass. Little moisture since February in wide swaths of the Northwest is to blame. And drought is deepening across the West, with federal drought maps showing massive and growing areas of red.

Much of the Northwest’s high country is still deep in good snowpack but short on rain this spring. That has dryland wheat farmers and cattle ranchers fretting. Cold, wind and dust are even wreaking havoc with produce farmers in the region.

A lot of freshly harvested wheat bound for Portland, Oregon, could stack up on the Columbia River system soon because an old guy wire has snapped on the Snake River’s Lower Monumental Dam.

The latest harvest estimates say Washington ranchers will harvest nearly 153 million bushels of wheat and Oregon 44 million bushels. That’s around average for both states. A typical barge holds around 122,500 bushels of wheat — meaning 44 million bushels would be about 360 barges full of grain on the Snake and Columbia Rivers heading toward export terminals.

A critical navigation lock on the lower Columbia River is expected to reopen this weekend, between 10 PM Friday and 10 AM Saturday, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The Northwest’s soft white wheat harvest is in full swing, but that grain is going nowhere fast. That’s because of an emergency repair to a lock at Bonneville Dam on the Lower Columbia River.

Right now, Northwest wheat farmers are wrapping up their harvest in many areas. But across the country, farmers are losing money on every load of that golden grain.