Great Bend Tribune
Published October 14, 2023
The drought monitor report as of 8 a.m. Tuesday, October 10, shows no real change for our area this week or really for the state. Southwest Kansas is still overall in the best shape for the state followed by Northwest Kansas. The six to ten-day outlook (October 18 to 22) indicates a 40 to 50% of leaning to above normal temperatures and near normal precipitation (not much). Normal precipitation good for harvesting crops and you may have noticed a lot of milo along with corn and soybeans coming off. The eight to fourteen-day outlook (October 20 to 26) indicates normal temperatures and a 33 to 40% chance of below normal for precipitation. Definitely not what we want for wheat planting and establishment. And it looks like a killing frost isn’t close.
We take for granted the crops we grow here: wheat, corn, soybeans, grain sorghum, alfalfa, sunflowers, and a few others. Have you ever stopped to think that outside of some native grasses, nothing we grow here is truly native? The closest we can come is with soybeans and sunflowers. And when European settlers arrived indigenous peoples were growing corn, it had already taken a long journey. This week, where do are major crop species come from. Next week: Crop adaption and climate change.
- Sunflowers – We are the Sunflower State and there are many native species of sunflowers. Native cultures grew sunflowers as long as 4,500 years ago. However, the sunflowers we cultivate today come to us via Russia after several hundred years in Europe.
- Corn – Came from teosinte in Mexico/Central America. It’s estimated corn has been grown for over 10,000 years starting with indigenous people and moved throughout North America over a long period of time. The field corn we grow today is greatly different than what we term “Indian Corn.
- Wheat – Modern wheat originated the Fertile Crescent, today’s Middle East along with countries like Iraq and Turkey and cultivation likely goes back over 12,000 years. Most Kansans know the story of the Volga German Mennonites coming over from what was then Russia with Turkey Red wheat that is today’s hard red winter wheat. Remember there are many types of wheat besides what we typically grow.
- Soybeans – This crop comes from central China approximately 9,000 or so years ago. This crop came here in the mid-18th Century. And while grown since then, soybeans became more and more important after George Washington Carver found they were high in protein and oil and helped improve the soil.
- Grain Sorghum – this cop originated approximately 10,000 years ago in sub-Saharan Africa. There are other very closely related species around the world. Broom corn is a sorghum species and molasses come from this genus.
- Alfalfa – Alfalfa was first cultivated in central Asia, coming from South Central Asia an estimated over 8,000 years ago. There are written records of it in Greece and Turkey well over 2,500 years ago.