Manitoba Agriculture reports hot dry weather has resulted in premature ripening of some crops and reduced yields. Dennis Lange, a pulse and soybean specialist with Manitoba Agriculture and editor of the provincial crop report, says a lack of moisture is a concern in some regions.
We’re looking in the cereal side, mostly in the fall rye and winter wheat that harvest has begun and is going in most areas right now. We’re anywhere from 30 to 60 percent complete in some areas and some areas with few acres even up to 80 percent complete on the fall cereals.
There’s been a little bit of spring wheat harvested in some of the central region. That’s mainly just due to the drier conditions that we saw this past summer that prematurely ripened the crop so yield reports are lower than what we are accustomed to in previous years. We’re hearing in the 30’s as far as numbers go on spring wheat. We’ll kind of see how that progresses as we get more into harvest in the next week or so. We have seen some crop come in maybe a little bit earlier than what we would normally see.
We’ve had some warm conditions as of late and we’re starting to see field peas in some regions start to be harvested as well. They’re finding that desiccation is working really well because we’ve had some warmer conditions and they’re trying to beat the weather here that’s projected for later this week. They’re projecting a little bit of rain so we’re trying to get ahead of that on those crops that are already mature.
Any crops though that are longer season crops like soybeans would actually really benefit from moisture at this point. We’re starting to hear some concerns that, in some areas, soybeans are short but the also leaves are starting to curl up a little bit in areas that are super dry and that will affect the yields. What we’re finding is that some of those last few pods aren’t going to fill if we don’t get any moisture and in some cases we’re starting to lose a few pods.
~ Dennis Lange, Manitoba Agriculture
Lang says we’ll see how the next week progresses but soybeans are definitely going to be lower yielding this year than last when soybeans broke the provincial record for yields. He says time will tell where those numbers will be at.
