A cereal crop specialist with Manitoba Agriculture Food and Rural Development reports, with the harvest ranging anywhere from 30 percent complete to complete, crop quality is well below average while yields are slightly above average.
After a later than normal start to spring planting that delayed crop development farmers in much of Manitoba were challenged by extremely wet conditions just as the harvest was about to begin.
Pam de Rocquigny, a cereal crop specialist with Manitoba Agriculture Food and Rural Development, reports harvest progress is all over the board with the central region being the most advanced and the southwest and northwest regions lagging the furthest behind.
Quality, it’s definitely had an impact.
Obviously for our cereal crop types, our spring wheats, our wheat and our barley we’re definitely seeing an impact to the quality just due to the wetter conditions that occurred during the harvest and are occurring as the cereal harvest continues.
We’re hearing downgrading due to things such as mildew, sprouting.
We’re hearing some downgrading due to fusarium damaged kernels and ergot as well but definitely the weathering type of downgrading is definitely having an impact in terms of our cereal crop types.
In canola it seems so far that the quality has been reported as good so I guess there’s a little bit of a silver lining there.
Then as well in terms of the yields that we’ve been hearing, for the most part we’ve been hearing average yields to even slightly above average yields so that’s also I guess a little piece of good news in terms of what’s been a challenging year so far.
But as harvest progresses into some of these later seeded crop types in terms of some of our cereals and canola we’re expecting some of the yields to maybe decrease slightly just due to the fact that they were a bit later seeded so kind of a range of conditions out there in terms of both yields and quality of the crop.
De Rocquigny estimates we still need a couple of more weeks for harvest to wrap up in Manitoba and for our longer season crops we’ll probably need a little more time than that.
