Longtime downtown store heading for Iowa Street

After 47 years in business on Massachusetts Street, Stoneback Appliance is moving out of the downtown Lawrence area.

Store owner Joe Scales and his crew began moving appliances out of the store’s location at 929 Mass., above, on Monday and into its new location at 925 Iowa.

Scales said the store is leaving its downtown location because the business needs more room to add two new lines of appliances, plus expand an existing line. The new location, which is in the Hillcrest Shopping Center, will give the store about 35 percent more showroom space.

“Downtown is the goose that laid the golden egg for Lawrence, so it is hard to leave this place,” said Scales, who has been with the store for 24 years.

The new store, which will occupy the space of a former art supply store, Art Cornerstone, is expected to open in about a week.

Merger: Nestle to buy ice cream firm

Nestle SA is merging its U.S. ice cream business including the Haagen-Dazs brand into Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream Inc. in exchange for $2.4 billion in stock in a deal that would give the world’s biggest food and beverage company a majority stake in California-based Dreyer’s.

Nestle said it would receive 55 million newly-issued Dreyer’s shares, boosting its stake in Dreyer’s to 67 percent from the current 23 percent, under terms of the deal announced Monday.

Oakland, Calif.-based Dreyer’s says its flagship ice cream, marketed as Dreyer’s in Texas and the western United States and as Edy’s in the rest of the country, is the best-selling brand of packaged ice cream in the United States.

Crop insurance: Farmers turn in losses of $24 million so far

Roughly 2,800 Kansas farmers have filed insurance claims for this year’s drought-plagued wheat crop, collecting $24 million so far even as losses mount with the start of wheat harvest, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s risk management agency said Monday.

This year’s wheat crop in Kansas is insured for $645 million, and the money paid out so far is mostly for abandoned acres, said Rebecca Davis, director of the Topeka regional office of the risk management agency.

Those payments only reflect claims paid to date, with the agency now processing a backlog of claims as the harvest begins. Many farmers wait until harvest to see how much wheat they can cut from questionable fields before putting in their claims, so it will not be until after harvest ends before the final loss figures are tallied, she said.

Agriculture: Wheat crop still struggling

Almost half of the Kansas wheat crop is still rated as poor or very poor the Kansas Agricultural Statistics Service said Monday in its weekly crop report.

Wheat condition was ranked as 22 percent very poor, 27 percent poor, 32 percent fair, 18 percent good, and 1 percent excellent. About 39 percent of the wheat across the state is now ripe.

Among other Kansas crops:

Corn condition is rated as 1 percent very poor, 5 percent poor, 36 percent fair, 54 percent good and 4 percent excellent.

Soybean planting is 81 percent finished. Soybean condition was ranked as 2 percent poor, 31 percent fair, 61 percent good and 6 percent excellent.