(Lincoln Journal Star) -- Wheat prices on the Kansas City Board of Trade price closed Tuesday at $12.61 for a May futures contract. To say these are record prices for the hard red winter wheat raised in Nebraska seems to fall short of adequate description. A search of long-term records in Kansas City indicates that the highest futures price before the surge that started in late 2006 was $7.44 in April 1996. Royce Schaneman, based in Lincoln with the Nebraska Wheat Board, points to several factors in explaining this ascent into thin marketing air. More countries have more money to spend on grain imports. The weak U.S. dollar adds to the amount of wheat competing currencies will buy. Drought has hurt wheat production in Australia and other prominent wheat settings. And an emphasis on ethanol has crowded out some wheat acres and replaced them with corn. It’s mostly good news from Schaneman’s perspective, but he’s worrying about government rationing. “We don’t want to get into a situation where the U.S. government or somebody is going to step in and say we need to ration, or slow down exports, so we’ve got a domestic supply.”
