Manitoba Agriculture reports harvest progress across the province was slowed by rain this past week but remains head of the long-term average.
Manitoba Agriculture’s just released crop report indicates precipitation was general across the province this past week with amounts ranging from 6.1 to 67.6 millimeters.
Dennis Lange, a pulse and soybean specialist with Manitoba Agriculture, says corn and soybeans make up the majority of the crops still to come off, there are still some dry beans left to finish the there is still the odd canola field.
It was very slow movement over the last week. Most areas received some rainfall, some areas more significant than others. We only moved up about one percent from the previous week toward harvest completion. We’re currently sitting at about 86 percent and, one of the things we’ve talked about most of the summer has been weather and lately we’ve been getting not a lot of sun.
We’ve been getting some light showers that have moved through, we’re seeing very short days, we’ve seen some foggy mornings too so it’s making for shorter days. Even in the last couple of days we’d get a few hours of sunshine and not enough to do a lot of drying. So, crops like sunflowers are just getting going right now. They’ve been waiting for the plants to dry down to a point where moisture levels are below 10 percent and we’re just starting to see the first sunflowers start to come off in the last day or so.
By next week’s crop report we should have a few acres that we can target. Right now, it’s just the shorter days and, even though temperatures are in the mid-teens, we’re not seeing a lot of drying like we would in September.
~ Dennis Lange, Manitoba Agriculture
Lange says we’ll see what the weather brings but the forecast looks good so over the next week he expects the soybeans to approach 90 percent complete, while canola is at about 87 percent compete. He says we’re getting close to the end and considering all things, we’ll be looking at an acceptable crop this year.
