Quick Pics: Cleaning up an oversupply of grain

Spring wheat belonging to CHS Big Sky sits piled Sept. 4 along U.S. Highway 2 east of Havre. This pile was about 250 bushels of grain, Lance Johnson, grain manager for the company, said and approximately 550 bushels more wheat had to be piled on the ground in the elevator's yard after a better than expected spring wheat harvest. Tom Chard, an agricultural statistician with USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service Montana Field Office, said the final numbers aren't in for this year to give a precise picture of harvest in north-central Montana, but the state forecast is for 96.9 million bushels of spring wheat to be harvested this year, almost double the 2017 harvest. As of Thursday, Montana's average wheat harvest is 34 bushels per acre, he added, up from 21 bushels per acre in 2017.