Manitoba Agriculture reports this year’s harvest is getting underway earlier than normal.
Manitoba Agriculture released its weekly crop report yesterday.
Anastasia Kubinec, the Manager of Crop Industry Development with Manitoba Agriculture, reports, with the hot weather that we had last week and the scattered rains, crops advanced quickly.
We have most of our crops moving from their final vegetative stages into reproductive, corn has tasseled and is starting to silk through most of the province, sunflowers are headed and are starting to pollinate.
Wheat, barley, oats are ripening up, peas have stopped flowing and are starting to finish their pod filling, canola has stopped flowering as well and in pod fill. Everything is looking good. The only concerns that we have had is in areas where they have not received the rainfall that they’ve needed.
Some crops are starting to prematurely ripen on areas of lighter soils or on hilltops. There are a lot of farmers that have been out assessing whether or not they’re going to be doing their desiccation application at stages appropriate for that or if they’re looking to swath. Quite a few farmers have been pulling out their harvesting machinery or swathers and they’re going over them, greasing them, making sure that everything is running properly, bins are being cleaned out and everything is getting ready for harvest to start.
In some areas harvest may be starting today but there’s a lot of areas where harvest is probably still a week to two weeks off. More of the southern regions is where harvest is going to begin first and in the very dry east regions, those will be the first ones that do combine.
~ Anastasia Kubinec, Manitoba Agriculture
Kubinec says most of Manitoba did receive scattered thundershowers through the last week but there are some areas that are quite dry including a pocket in the south central region from Cypress to Rathwell, Gladstone to Plumas, Altona to Emerson and in the Northern Interlake north of Arborg. She says the Pas region and the Dauphin region are quite wet.
