A warm winter followed by a cold spring has devastated Kentucky's winter wheat crop and could cost the state's grain farmers $45 million or more in lost revenues.

Unseasonably warm weather coaxed the grain out of its winter dormancy earlier than usual and left the tender new leaves vulnerable to last week's cold. Temperatures fell to as low as 18 degrees in the grain country of southwestern Kentucky last weekend, said Don Halcomb, a wheat farmer and chairman of the promotion council for the Kentucky Small Grain Growers Association. That doomed about half the state's crop.

Halcomb estimated the damage will cost the average grower $75,000, and dashed hopes that an early wheat crop combined with higher corn and soybean prices would yield banner profits for grain farmers this year.

Farmers usually plant soybeans in the same fields after the wheat crop is harvested.

"I don't think people will actually go out of business, but everybody was thinking agriculture was getting better this year -- it takes a lot of the fun out of it," Halcomb said. "We're going to need the higher prices on soybeans and corn. It'll take three or four years to work yourself out of the hole."

Most of the state's wheat is grown west of Interstate 65 in the southern tier of counties along the Tennessee border. It ranks third among Kentucky's grain crops behind corn and soybeans, said Jim Herbek, grain crop specialist with the University of Kentucky extension service in Princeton.

Kentucky farmers had about 300,000 acres planted in wheat this year, Herbek said, compared with 1.3 million acres each of soybeans and corn. Total value of the wheat crop would have been about $90 million. The corn crop this year could be worth as much as $780 million, he said, and soybeans $390 million more.

Herbek said it's been too cool to assess the full extent of the damage to the wheat crop, but the depth and duration of the cold and early signs of blanching and collapsing wheat stems bear out the grain growers' estimate of the worst damage to Kentucky's wheat crop in 20 years.

Crop insurance will mitigate the loss for some farmers and an early planting of soybeans in ruined wheat fields will improve the soybean yields, recouping some of the loss, Halcomb said, but growers hope federal disaster aid -- low-interest loans -- will be approved to help them recover.

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