Manitoba Agriculture reports yields on the earlier harvested crops are coming in at about average.
Manitoba Agriculture released its weekly crop report yesterday.
Anastasia Kubinec, the Manager of Crop Industry Development with Manitoba Agriculture, reports harvest is widespread throughout the regions, except for the northwest and into the southwest.
Producers are getting average yields in winter wheat, fall rye, field peas. That’s the majority of crops that have been harvested. Weather over the past week has been a little bit variable. We had a bit of a cool down which was much appreciated by the crop. We had some moisture, we had some very cool evenings too which helped some of the crop recuperate from high temperatures but, over the weekend, we had some significant hail storms go through and a tornado which did cause some crop damage in some areas.
In some of the earlier crops, rain is now too late. They’ll be taken off. Any rainfall that does occur is not going to help them fill. In later crops we are seeing some wilting symptoms in some of the full season crops like soybeans, corn, sunflowers. A little bit of precipitation does temporarily alleviate that. We are starting to see some of the effects of the long term dry and very hot conditions that we have seen this summer.
With the hail that fell over the weekend, it varied from insignificant damage to very high damage. In the Interlake they do have areas that were very hard hit and inspectors and insurance companies are out with producers currently and they’re assessing the amount of damage that has occurred to those crops.
~ Anastasia Kubinec, Manitoba Agriculture
Kubinec says, for most crops, disease has not been an issue in 2018 but, as a result of the dry weather, grasshoppers are moving from ditches into crops and farmers are still monitoring for things like bertha armyworms and spider mites.
