Wichita ? Participants in the annual Kansas wheat tour are finding progressively poorer wheat fields as the group nears more parched counties in western Kansas.

The group initially was looking at potential wheat yields of between 40 and 50 bushels per acre early Tuesday when it left Manhattan, said Brett Myers, executive vice president of the Kansas Association of Wheat Growers.

Myers was traveling on U.S. Highway 36, along the northern tier of Kansas counties, where the wheat looked pretty good until the tour got into Rooks County.

“As we went farther west, it got worse and it got drier,” he said in a phone interview from Oberlin.

“There is no subsoil moisture there,” Myers said. “If we can get the soil moisture probe 3 to 4 inches into the ground we are doing good.”

Tour participants stop every 20 miles, pulling up into a field to count stalks in a representative square-foot sample.

On another leg of the tour, Hoisington wheat grower Dean Stoskopf was traveling along U.S. Highway 24 a bit farther south than Myers. Stoskopf said fields looked good with good subsoil moisture and potential yields of 40 to 50 bushels until the group got to Osborne County.

“The farther west we come, the poorer the wheat gets. Quite a bit is showing drought stress,” Stoskopf said in a phone interview from Hill City.

The wheat hasn’t germinated in parts of Graham County, where some fields are showing bare spots. In some spots the fields would do well to make 20 bushels per acre — if it got favorable rain in the next few weeks, Stoskopf said.

“This is kind of a snapshot right now of the potential,” Stoskopf said. “The next months will have a lot to do with what the crop does right now.”

A warm spring has pushed maturity of the crop a week to 10 days earlier than normal.

Kansas Agricultural Statistics Service this week rated wheat conditions as 11 percent very poor, 19 percent poor, 31 percent fair, 33 percent good and 6 percent excellent.

The tour covers 85 percent of the state during more than 520 stops before winding up Thursday at the Kansas City Board of Trade, where their forecast production for the 2004 wheat crop will be announced.

Kansas had an excellent winter wheat crop last year, harvesting 480 million bushels in a year when few other crops prospered. Wheat production was up 80 percent from the drought-stricken 2002 crop.

Kansas usually produces about 400 million bushels in a state renowned as the nation’s breadbasket. During the 2002 drought, Kansas harvested 267 million bushels.

Today, the tour will be in the driest parts of the state: its westernmost counties bordering the Colorado state line.

“Tomorrow is going to be the real telling day,” Stoskopf said.