Manitoba Agriculture expects the fall rye and possibly the earliest spring wheat harvests to get underway within the next one to two weeks.
Dennis Lange, a pulse and soybean specialist with Manitoba Agriculture and editor of the provincial crop report, says with the hot weather that we’re having we can expect a lot of quick movement over the next week or so.
When we’re looking at cereals, in particularly the winter cereal crops continued to dry down over the last week with some producers applying preharvest herbicides or swathing as needed. There’s been some swathing of some fall rye in the area as well. Northing harvested yet but, over the next week or so, we’re going to see some harvesting happening in some of those areas, especially areas around the Carman area where things are a little bit more mature just because of the dry conditions that we’ve seen in some of those regions but I have seen some fall rye swathed in the eastern part of the region as well. When we’re looking at spring wheat, we’re starting to see a little bit of turning and color change as well.
Overall, the cereal crops remain fair to good in most regions. Oats in some of the lighter soils and lower rainfall areas are starting to show some stress symptoms, notably turning white and rapidly drying down. Especially in that Carman region we might even see some spring wheat over the next week that might get harvested just because of the dryness that we’re seeing. Overall, most areas wheat is looking pretty good for the most part.
We’re going to start to see a littler bit of the fall rye come off over the next week and hopefully for next week’s report we might have some early yield numbers. But everything else I think it’ll still be a couple or three weeks before we start getting any yield off the wheat fields. They’re getting closer, turning but we’ve still got a few weeks yet before they’re ready to be harvested.
~ Dennis Lange, Manitoba Agriculture
Lange says for the most part we haven’t seen anything significant in terms of weather-related crop damage and moisture reserves vary across the province.
He says we’re still at 110 percent of our normal growing degree days so we’re ahead of the game in that respect and it will be interesting to see what the yields will be like.
