ALLEN — Soaring wheat prices have made the crop a hot commodity in the Skagit Valley, but two weeks of rain have put a damper on farmers’ anticipated profits.

Persistent rains could make more than half the local soft white winter wheat harvested this summer too wet for food production. Rain followed by sunshine induces the wheat to sprout, reducing its quality to livestock feed. Farmers would then be forced to take a lower price for their crop.

The good news is that wheat is fetching such a high price that the bad weather isn’t necessarily disastrous. Wheat has been $4 a bushel for decades, and farmers have been content to plant it mainly to improve the soil for the next round of potatoes.

“There hasn’t been that much money in wheat. It’s been used as a cover crop. They can accept not making much money on it,” said Troy Knutzen, manager of Chris Knutzen Grain in Allen.

The latest price per bushel for August is $8.33, Knutzen said, and the price will only rise over the next four months.

Even dramatically higher prices for fuel and fertilizer haven’t been severe enough to wipe out wheat’s profitability.

“With a good crop you can still plan on making a good profit, despite fuel and fertilizer costs,” Knutzen said.

The question is, how much of a good crop will there be?

Knutzen said it’s too early to tell. About half the wheat is still in the fields. His company’s best guess Thursday was that 40 to 45 percent of the wheat in the Skagit Valley would be sprout-free.

The price cut farmers must take for sprouted wheat depends on what percentage of the crop has the telltale green shoot at the base of the wheat kernel.

For every 10 percent of wheat that has sprouted, a bushel will sell for $1 less, said Scott McKnight, general manager of Conway Feed. That $1 drop in price translates into more than $8,000 lost for every 100 acres of wheat.

“Fortunately the price of wheat is still fairly high,” McKnight said. “Because of the grain prices, it’s going to soften the hit a little bit.”

A year ago, Skagit farmers got $6 a bushel for their wheat. As soon as they had sold, they watched the price soar, and they planted an unprecedented amount of wheat last September and October.

Knutzen estimated that the amount of wheat planted in the valley is up four- or fivefold this season. Don McMoran, agricultural educator for the Washington State University Extension office in Mount Vernon, said more wheat than ever has been planted in the county — some 15,000 acres.

When farmers planted last fall, they had high hopes for this July and August. It’s just that the weather hasn’t cooperated.

First of all, summer was slow to arrive, delaying harvest by about two weeks. By now, all the wheat would be cut. Just about all of it would have been harvested when the rain showed up on Aug. 18.

In the 11 days since, 1.94 inches of rain have fallen at the WSU Extension office on Memorial Highway. On average, Mount Vernon gets 1.34 inches of rain during the entire month of August.

Wet or dry, the wheat is coming into Knutzen Grain, which processes most of the wheat in a 15-mile radius. With harvest only half over, the company’s 12 tall silos are already full. The company cleared old equipment from two storage sheds to make room for all the wheat it expects this year.

“We’re going to have wheat come out the doors here before too much longer,” Knutzen said. “We trying to get as much freight, trucking and rail cars, to make room for the second half of harvest.”

Common wisdom on the price increase has it that wheat rode the coattails of corn and soybeans as the demand for biofuels increased. But Knutzen said wheat’s rise to $15 a bushel earlier this year, before settling down to $8, had more to do with poor wheat crops in Russia and Australia.

If prices remain high, so will the local interest in growing wheat, Knutzen said, even though the fields used to grow wheat this year need to be rotated to a different crop.

“I still expect strong wheat production next year also,” he said.

• Ralph Schwartz can be reached at 360-416-2138 or .