Farmers will be hard-pressed to cash in on some of the highest wheat prices in years, as hot, dry weather looks to speed the pace of Kansas’ wheat harvest, wheat experts say.

Wheat futures settled at $6.06 per bushel Thursday on the Chicago Board of Trade. Prices had briefly reached $7 per bushel in 1994.

Mike Woolverton, a grain marketing economist at Kansas State University, said that this season’s stretch of strong prices likely would last longer than the 1994 run, because of prospects for a smaller-than-expected crop in the Great Plains. In Kansas, yields are down and test weights and other measures of grain quality are sagging behind even last year’s drought-plagued crop.

“We had terrific quality wheat last year – high protein levels, high weights per bushel,” Woolverton said. “This year, not only is the yield down, but the quality is down.”

The crop has drastically deteriorated in the past six weeks, he said, and it now appears freeze damage also is more widespread in Kansas than earlier believed.