Hutchinson ? The poor quality of the Kansas wheat crop this year has some flour millers wondering if they will have to import grain from other states to take care of their customers.

A combination of bad weather and plant disease decimated thousands of acres of wheat across the Midwest, leaving this year’s crop full of shriveled, broken kernels. Millers can’t use the damaged wheat because it won’t roll through the mills and isn’t high enough quality to put on grocery shelves.

At the Horizon Milling plant in Newton, a Cargill Foods affiliate, facility manager Natalie Gosch said only “a couple 10,000 bushels” at the mill this year are usable for flour. Typically, the mill bins 3 million bushels.

“At this time of year, we are usually settling up with farmers and have several million bushels in the elevator, but we don’t have that this year,” Gosch said. “This can have a huge impact on our business, and right now, we are still hashing out what that impact will be.”

Even in western Kansas, where farmers had record yields, the crop is low in protein, so it is not as useful to millers.

At Tribune Grain in Greeley County, elevator owner Dan Hild said protein levels were averaging around 9.5 percent. Mills typically want 12 percent protein.

That was caused in part because some western Kansas farmers who fertilized for a 40-bushel crop were getting 60 bushels. Hild said he had to buy out one $9,000 contract because he couldn’t deliver the required protein level.

Good bread requires high-protein wheat, said Michael Woolverton, a Kansas State University grain marketing economist. But millers will have to be innovative this year because of short wheat stocks around the world, he said.

Millers can add gluten to low-protein wheat, he said, or mix poorer test weight wheat with better quality.

“There are ways to offset some of this, and they will have to do that this year,” he said.

Hudson’s Stafford County Flour Mills president Al Brensing will fill contracts using some wheat left over from last year after the mill and its area elevators took in less than half a normal crop.

Brensing said he hasn’t seen a crop like this during his 70 years in the business.

“We’re still not far enough into this, we’re still using last year’s wheat,” Brensing said. “We’ll have to feel our way along. Quality is one thing we always strive for here, and we are going to do the best we can this year, also.”