A weather and crop specialist with CWB reports yield and quality prospects for western Canada’s 2012 crop look good.
The winter wheat harvest in western Canada is now well underway, there’s been some early combining of some specialty crops and the spring wheat harvest will soon begin.
Bruce Burnett, a weather and crop specialist with CWB, says at this point crop quality and yields look good.
From all reports to date the quality of the winter wheat has been good, very good yields combined with low disease levels in the grain so very few downgrading factors showing up.
Even the test weights for the crops are relatively good as well so that’s good news to date.
Again we would expect that maybe we’ll see some disease in some of the winter and spring wheat crops depending on when the rains occurred during their life development cycle but generally speaking to date we’re looking at a fairly high quality fairly high yielding crop so far.
Spring wheat crops are looking relatively good.
The cereal crops may be a little bit better off than some of the oilseed crops but we are seeing some reasonable yield potentials.
Of course for the summer, things like soybeans and corn, there’s a little bit of concern because south central and south eastern areas of Manitoba have dried off significantly here and with this heat it is going to impact yield potential for crops, especially soybeans and corn.
Burnett notes anticipated significantly reduced corn yields in the U.S. due to drought have driven corn prices up over eight dollars a bushel on the futures exchanges and that has influenced prices for all of the other crops and he anticipates continued strong prices for the rest of this year and into next year.
