A weather and crop specialist with CWB reports grain yields this year will be slightly above average but crop quality will suffer.
By the end of September approximately 70 percent of the 2014 prairie harvest was complete, well below the 90 percent complete at this time last year.
Bruce Burnett, a weather and crop specialist with CWB, says the main concerns now are dealing with the lateness of harvest and some of the damage that some of the rains in late August and early September have caused.
The harvest in September basically had been interrupted by some heavy rains.
It started in the last week of August and into the first week in September and that plus the fact that some of the crop was not ready yet certainly caused initial harvest delays.
We had very little of the crop, less than 30 percent of the crop harvested by the 15 of September but with some drier weather since the 15 of September we’ve seen that progress pick up considerably.
The rains again have been the biggest factor.
There were some frosts in the last week in August and certainly in the first week in September in certain regions.
We did see crops affected by that but only the latest crops were hurt in terms of crop quality and, for the most part, we did manage to get most areas mature before the first fall frost.
Burnett says crop quality will be down which will affect the availability of higher quality crops but yields seem to be holding up rather well and we are gong to have a year of slightly above average yields across the prairies which is a good result considering the rains we had this past spring.
