Mayfield ? Mayfield farmer Randall Andra waited patiently at the elevator here for his turn to unload a tractor-trailer load of wheat as the harvest picked up speed Monday throughout south-central Kansas.

“Couldn’t be happier. Wonderful weather,” Andra said. “I don’t even mind waiting in line.”

Andra and his wife, Carol, started cutting their 900 acres of wheat with one combine last Thursday and expect to be finished within a week. His last load at the elevator had test weights of 62 pounds a bushel and he figured he is getting yields around 60 bushels an acre.

“I’ve got an excellent crop this year — it’s probably twice the crop I had last year,” he said.

While Andra still managed to get an average crop last year, many farmers in this area were not as lucky. A hailstorm downed a lot of wheat a year ago, making this year’s harvest especially important.

On Monday, the Kansas Agricultural Statistics Service reported just one percent of the state’s wheat crop has been harvested to date. Last year at this time, 3 percent of the wheat was already in the bin. The five-year average is 10 percent harvested by this time in the season.

Wheat is ripening rapidly and the harvest is under way in southern counties where fields are dry enough. The service rated wheat condition as 5 percent very poor, 11 percent poor, 31 percent fair, 42 percent good,and 11 percent excellent.

About 96 percent of the wheat has turned color, the service said.

At the Farmer’s Co-op in Mayfield, elevator manager Mike Reed said the area is about average, with test weights ranging from 56 to 61 pounds per bushel. Grain with test weights of at least 60 pounds per bushel is graded as No. 1 wheat.

Down the road at the Danville Co-op in Argonia, elevator manager Ken Kohlenberg said they had taken in 200,000 bushels so far and expect to get in 800,000 bushels as usual.

The crop looks average in these parts, but elevators are all reporting high dockage on prices because of cheat grass and rye contaminating the wheat.