Make no mistake that this is an awesome weather pattern coming up for getting row crops harvested throughout the Nation's midsection. Whether you are harvesting corn, soybeans, cotton, sugar beets, or any other type of crop, any delays that are seen for the next ten days will be brief (a lot of places will get no rain at all in that period) and I get no indication of a turn to any sort of wetter weather in the 11-15 day time frame either.

Temperatures are also going to be exceptionally warm, particularly for today through about next Tuesday. What a difference a year makes, as October of 2009 was one of the coldest and wettest such months ever seen for a large part of the center of the country. I do not see much talk about it, and certainly do not see much market reaction to it, but personally I am quite worried about how this weather shapes up with regards to winter wheat planting.

There are large parts of the soft-red winter wheat belt that are simply "bone-dry" right now, and we are getting to a similar situation pretty quickly in the Plains. The Drought Monitor map that will be released tomorrow should show an expansion of the area under drought conditions, and this week's warm and dry weather should mean huge amounts of topsoil in the short/very short categories when we get fresh data on that subject next Monday afternoon.

Oklahoma this week reported that farmers in that state were "postponing" winter wheat planting until it rains again, but I think that is also the case for some farmers in western Kansas and for a lot of farmers in the eastern Corn Belt and the Delta. We still have a lot of time to improve things, as winter wheat planting normally is not done until the end of this month. With that being said though, this weather pattern is going to have to change dramatically for sufficient rains to fall in order to get all winter wheat seeded on time.