For Grady County farmer Roger Godwin, the drought that
destroyed his corn crop wasn’t
all bad. After all, it did help him produce the record wheat
yield he’d dreamed of growing
for years. “I’ve been wanting to do it all along,”
Godwin said. “But it
just never quite got there.”

Godwin had gotten close to making 100 bushels per acre
before,
only missing his goal by
one or two bushels. But this year, after 15 years of trying, he
smashed through the
hundred-bushel-per-acre barrier, averaging an unheard-of 135
bushels per acre. That’s the
most wheat grown by an individual farmer since the University of
Georgia started keeping
records in the early 1980s.

“This time we hit it,” Godwin said with a smile. To
put the extraordinary
yield into perspective, Godwin’s average was more than two and a
half times the state
average of 52 bushels per acre, which was itself the highest
state average since 1866 –
two years after General Sherman hiked through Georgia.

Dry April, May Helped
Yields

“Certainly, the dry weather had a great impact in April
and May on our wheat
yields,” said Dewey Lee, a wheat specialist with the UGA
College of Agricultural and
Environmental Sciences. Dry weather late in the growing season
helps keep down wheat
diseases, he said, that could have hurt production.

Besides a record-setting yield, Godwin got another benefit.
He
grew exceptionally
high-quality wheat, which raises even more the price he will get
for his crop. Godwin, who
grew 200 acres of wheat, could have competition next year if
other growers follow a
prescription on ways to improve wheat in a booklet at county
extension offices. Lee, one
of the booklet authors, says farmers who follow the guidelines
can increase their yields
significantly.

The wheat may help some farmers stay in business, providing
money to help fight the
drought’s more detrimental effects. “That additional cash,
the extra yield, certainly
helped them greatly,” Lee said.

Godwin has only one regret. “Now, I sorta wish I had gone
ahead and planted more wheat,” he said. Other Georgia farmers
probably wish that, too. While their 240,000 acres of wheat
prospered this year, the drought devastated most of their
340,000
acres of corn.

The Georgia corn crop, only 20 percent harvested, is 72
percent mature, and the Georgia Agricultural Statistics Service
rates 51 percent poor or very poor. The record wheat harvest is
complete.