A weather and crop specialist with CWB reports hot weather over the past week has been just what was needed to speed along crop development.
The extremely late spring had caused concerns with the ability of prairie farmers to get their crops planted this year but relatively dry conditions during the first three weeks of May allowed rapid planting.
Bruce Burnett, a weather and crop specialist with CWB, notes heavy rains in southeastern Saskatchewan, southwestern Manitoba and south central Manitoba caused delays so some acres in those areas did not get planted but for the rest of the prairies planting was completed, on average, about ten later than normal.
The temperatures since the middle of May actually have been at normal or even a little bit above normal and certainly last week across the prairies we saw some very very warm temperatures.
Of course this certainly is needed at this point in time where we were able to see crops develop quite rapidly and hopefully this trend continues.
The warm temperatures didn’t really cause any damage to the crops in most growing regions because we have plenty of subsoil moisture from the spring rains as well as the winter snow pack but certainly forecasts for some rains this week will help supplement the moisture in some of the areas in the prairies.
Burnett says the timing of harvest will depend on the temperatures we get over the coming weeks but winter cereal crops and early spring crops are heading now which would push harvest dates into the last week of August on the southern prairies while the later seeded crops will be harvested well into September so there will be a wide range of harvest dates.
