State’s wheat harvest marks upswing

Washington’s 2009 winter wheat yield of 59 bushels per acre accounted for 96.8 million bushels of wheat, according to figures released last week by the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service in Olympia.

Eighty-five percent of that total was white wheat, the primary cash crop in Whitman County.

Yields were up three bushels per acre from the 2008 crop, while the total crop was up less than one percent from last year’s crop.

Winter wheat was planted on 1.64 million acres of land last fall, which was 1.72 million acres of land seeded in fall 2007 for the...