A weather and crop specialist with CWB reports dry conditions on the western prairies combined with a widespread frost that hit Manitoba and Saskatchewan will result in dramatically reduced yield potentials.
With the exception of some green feed crops being seeded in some of the wetter areas, spring planting across the Canadian prairies is complete.
Bruce Burnett, a weather and crop specialist with CWB says in a lot of cases farmers completed planting two to three weeks ahead of last year.
Unfortunately the reason that we managed to compete the seeding as quickly as we did was the fact that we’ve been relatively dry across the prairie region and, in some cases, crops that have emerged are only partially emerged so there is some difficulty in terms of the emergence of the crop.
Essentially the combination of the dry conditions and an extensive frost two weeks ago has resulted in a considerable amount of replanting of canola especially in western Manitoba, eastern Saskatchewan.
When you distill all of this, although we planted the crops two to three weeks earlier than normal, we really are going to see another year where we have slower than normal early season growth and that’s going to result in a crop that’s going to be harvested at a normal time or slightly later than normal so we are now looking at mostly a September harvest for a lot of these crops.
Burnett notes we have an extensive dry area in western Saskatchewan and through most of Alberta that has already impacted yield potentials so we’re looking at yields that are well below normal across that entire region, while on the eastern side of the prairies, we’re seeing yield potentials that are a little closer to average and, in parts of Manitoba, there will be some above average yields as well.
