Manitoba Agriculture reports, to accommodate crop insurance seeding deadlines, farmers have been adjusting their orders of planting.
Anne Kirk, a cereal crops specialist with Manitoba Agriculture, says heavy rainfall over the weekend in several locations further delayed spring seeding but seeded acreage increased over the past week to about 83 percent complete compared to the five-year average of 88 percent.
Most areas of the province have exceeded 150 percent of normal precipitation and all regions of the province have received more 100 percent of normal precipitation since May 1st so in general it is wet, good moisture conditions or too wet depending on where you are throughout the province and it has typically been cool so that growing degree accumulation is near or below normal for the majority of the province. In some cases, people, especially for pasture and forage growth, are looking to see more heat units because we do have a lot of moisture to get those crops growing.
In the many areas that received quite a bit of rainfall the previous week, so we had that rain and snow event that happened not last week but the week before on Friday, many farmers that received a lot of precipitation in that event still had water laying in fields or fields that were too wet to access when this new rain event happened on the weekend. Some people, they did dry up and were able to get at least a couple of days in seeding last week so that was great. For other people, they’re still waiting to get on wet fields.
We have seen planting progress and we did see a jump in planting over the past week. Last week were looking at 64 percent planted and now we’re estimating 83 percent but we still have quite a few unseeded acres in some regions. Then, just in terms of planting order, we do have seeding deadlines coming up for soybeans, corn. In some areas the soybean seeding deadline has passed as of May 30th so farmers had been adjusting their order of planting away from their typical order just to get some of those crops where the crop insurance deadline was approaching in faster.
~ Anne Kirk, Manitoba Agriculture
Kirk expects a big push to get seeding completed within the next week and, as fields start to dry up, there may be considerations for replanting on fields that may have been under water for extended periods.
