A weather and crop specialist with CWB expects the majority of prairie farmers to be planting more wheat and canola this year.
Due to this year’s late spring planting progress to date across the prairies stands at approximately 15 percent complete compared to about 60 percent at this point last year with areas in southern Alberta and southwestern Saskatchewan the furthest advanced.
Bruce Burnett, a weather and crop specialist with CWB, says we’ve seen considerable progress over the past week.
The majority of farmers are going to be planting wheat and canola this year.
Those are the two crops that we’re seeing fairly substantial acreages in.
The canola areas is dropping from its record last year but certainly again a healthy area devoted to canola and the wheat area is increased year on year.
As long as we can continue seeding here through the second half of May without too many interruptions I think we’ll probably hit the targets that we have seen for the sown area for wheat.
In terms of the other crops we’re looking at a smaller area devoted to barley, an increase in oat area.
Of course these are the crops that one would look to see increases in if we did run into any planting difficulties that would force the farmers to plant into the middle of June or so then we would see some acreage switching to those two commodities more so than anything else.
But, generally speaking, it looks as if we still could get the original intentions at least planted given the current weather that we’ve had.
Burnett points out we’re still in the middle of May so, with the exception of some of the very early seeded crops like field peas, there’s still time to complete the seeding of most crops.
