A weather and crop specialist with CWB reports this year’s late spring has resulted in close to two million acres left unseeded and raised concerns over the potential for crops that were planted being damaged this fall by frost.
Due to a delayed spring melt farmers in western Canada got onto the fields to begin spring planting much later than normal this year.
Bruce Burnett, a weather and crop specialist with CWB, reports as a result crop development is currently running anywhere from one to two weeks behind normal, depending on location.
Certainly the late spring that we had delayed planting.
In most areas of the prairies we didn’t see general planting until the first weeks in May and in fact really the entire prairies only seemed to get going by the third week in May in terms of general planting progress.
The crop was put in later this year and it’s going to cause some issues in terms of crop development certainly that will become some concerns in the fall about frost dates I’m sure.
The other issue of course has been the areas that have been far too wet to plant.
Significant areas of western Manitoba, eastern Saskatchewan have had too much moisture to plant all the acres the farmers intended to plant so somewhere between one and a half and two million acres will be left unseeded this year in those areas.
Burnett says, with the exception of areas in southern Alberta and south-western Saskatchewan that remained quite during the planting period, moisture conditions have been good.
He says fortunately this past week we’ve seen some rain move into those areas so, other than the problems with excess moisture experienced in western Manitoba and eastern Saskatchewan moisture conditions have been quite good.
