Winter Cereals Canada reports the number of acres of seeded to winter wheat last fall across the Canadian prairies was about the same as the previous year but the distribution has changed.
Last fall’s late harvest created challenges for planting fall seeded cereals but crops that were planted are now covered by snow and are well protected from the cold.
Jake Davidson, the executive director of Winter Cereals Canada reports, according to figures released by Statistics Canada, the number of acres seeded to winter wheat fell in Manitoba but rose in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Saskatchewan has reported to Stats Canada 525 thousand acres seeded this last fall.
That is a significant increase from 390 thousand that were seeded in the previous year of which only 340 thousand is estimated to have been harvested which was about a 13 percent loss.
Unfortunately Manitoba took a bit of a hit.
Our seeded acreage this year is reported at 435 where as last year we had 600 thousand acres seeded but we took a real kicking last year.
We only pulled off 440 thousand acres, a 27 percent loss so, if this is a good winter, we may actually with a significantly lowered seeding acreage we may not be that much different in harvested acres taken out because if we don’t have the losses we had last year we could come up to pretty near the same numbers.
Alberta has got about 195 thousand which is up from their last year’s 165 thousand and they don’t have much in the way of winter kill there.
They had six percent loss last year.
On the prairies we’re looking at one million 155 thousand acres.
That’s identical to 2013, just spread out a little bit different.
Davidson says with the crops covered by snow they should be well protected and if nothing strange, like a January thaw, happens they should do all right but it’s a matter of now of waiting until spring.
