Manitoba Agriculture’s first crop report of the season indicates an average of two percent of this year crop had been planted across the province before work was interrupted by rain. The report was released on Tuesday, April 30.
Dennis Lange, a pulse and soybean specialist with Manitoba Agriculture and editor of the provincial crop report, says farmers were just getting started and had in about two percent of the crop before the rain started to fall.
That two percent compares very similar to the five-year average, at two percent as well. Growers that did get started in the last week or so have started with wheat and oats and barley and mostly in the central region where those percentages are upwards of 10 percent for each commodity type. Other areas are much lower than that but central was a bit further ahead based on the lack of moisture and snowfall through the wintertime and drier conditions.
A few farmers have started but now we’re in a position that, with the recent rains that we’ve had, things are pretty much shut down across the province for any planting this week. In the last few days here, we were getting anywhere from 10 to 30 millimetres of rainfall over the period of a week here in most of the growing regions that we cover. That’s going to assist in getting crops off to a good start once we get back to planting in the field.
In past years we’ve started off with drier conditions in spring. In some instances, growers would have had to go a little bit deeper to get that moisture. Now, with this widespread rain across the province, I think once growers get back into the field things are going to roll along quite nicely and we’ll be having more adequate moisture levels to start off the season for at least that initial germination.
~ Dennis Lange, Manitoba Agriculture
Lange says up until this current rain event growers were a little bit ahead of last year. He notes things didn’t get started until into May last year.
