Manitoba Agriculture reports, with recent rainfall events, precipitation accumulation in most areas of the province has exceeded 140 percent of normal since May 1.
Dennis Lange, a pulse and soybean specialist with Manitoba Agriculture and editor of the provincial crop report, says Agro-Manitoba received variable amounts of precipitation over the past eight days including isolated heavy rains and storms in several regions.
I guess we’ll start off with some of the weather because that seems to be what everybody’s talking about right now. Precipitation over the last eight days ranged from 10 millimeters up to almost 100 millimeters. The southwest, central and eastern regions accumulated the most precipitation between June 24th and July 1st. Winkler actually had 99.7 millimeters. They did receive the most and in that area you can definitely see some standing water in the fields, especially in the areas further south. In the central and eastern and Interlake definitely there’s some standing water in the fields so that part of it, we’re adequate moisture wise. Areas out west aren’t as bad. Northwest is a little bit better.
This next few days they’re calling for some wetter weather again. The heat is coming next week so hopefully the rainfall that we get this week is minimal and overall, we’ll see more crop progress. Things like some of the windy conditions we’ve seen this year have made spraying herbicide a little bit difficult so, in some areas, growers are behind on that. Some areas are out of staging as well but you look at soybeans and dry beans for example on the herbicide stage there’s still some opportunity to spray yet.
Hopefully we’re looking at a better week coming up next week. This week we just have to get through the week with minimal rainfall. That would be really good.
~ Dennis Lange, Manitoba Agriculture
Lange says the biggest concern right now is with the big rains in some areas where there’s still standing water so there will be crop loss in those areas. He says there have been no reports of hail over the last week or so and while winds were strong, most of the damage to crops has been the result of excess moisture.
