A combination of warmer temperatures and rain has given crops in Manitoba a good boost.
Manitoba Agriculture released its weekly Crop Report Tuesday.
Dane Froese, the Industry Development Specialist-Oilseeds with Manitoba Agriculture, says crops have really put on a good growth spurt in the last week to week and a half.
We’ve had near normal heat accumulations throughout much of the province so that’s really encouraged some growth as well as having decent amounts of rainfall occurring over much of southern, southwestern and northwestern Manitoba. Crops in those areas have put up some decent growth, particularly corn and soybeans and sunflowers, the later season crops that really benefitted from that heat, that moisture.
Cereals, at this point, it was a little bit late to benefit any yield potential there however the moisture is certainly helping to contribute to yield and grain head fill. We didn’t have a great start to the 2019 crop year. It was mostly very dry and quite cool for most parts of Agro-Manitoba and that delayed development early on. If we’re looking at long term averages and long term trends right now, we are approaching normal levels in terms of heat accumulation but we’re still between 40 and 80 percent of normal rainfall accumulation but there are some pockets that have achieved what is considered a near normal for the entire season. That is deceptive, given that most of that rainfall has fallen in the last two weeks.
At this point some crops are actually standing in puddles in the field or they’re unable to take up all of that moisture at once. The soil has started to recharge in some areas but we still need those timely rains to finish off the crop. Having it all at once isn’t as helpful as we would like it either. We do like to have rainfall that is dispersed evenly throughout the season.
~ Dane Froese, Manitoba Agriculture
Froese says generally insect pressures have been declining across but there are still concerns with cereal army worm and bertha armyworm counts going up in some areas and sporadic grasshopper issues where grasshoppers have moved in from the ditches and might be causing damage more to forages and hay land at this point.
