The executive director of Winter Cereals Canada is hoping to see the number of acres planted this year to winter wheat double that of the past couple of years.
Seeding deadlines for winter wheat in Manitoba range from August 20 to September 15 for full crop insurance coverage and from September 16 to 20 for 80 percent coverage.
Last fall’s late canola harvest reduced the available acres for planting winter wheat, resulting in a dramatic drop in winter wheat acres in Manitoba and Saskatchewan but a consistent number in Alberta.
Jake Davidson, the executive director of Winter Cereals Canada, reports, even with the reseeding of a lot of canola crop this year in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, there’s a been lot of canola harvested and the interest in winter wheat is up.
When the weather is in our favor there are an awful lot of people that will grow the crop and, when people see a good crop coming off of a neighbor’s, even if they haven’t grown it, then they start to think, maybe I’ll try 100 acres, maybe I’ll try a quarter. When the weather’s with us we can get really good numbers. We peaked out around 630,000 acres in Manitoba, 630,000 in Saskatchewan a few years back.
I don’t think we’re going to hit those numbers but if things hold together I would like to see numbers twice what we had the last year or two. That would make my group in Saskatchewan and in Manitoba very happy because, a good size crop like that, of course we do live on levy and what we do with the levy is pay for research and we’ve got some pretty heavy duty research projects on the go so a good crop gives us more producer investment into the research.
Davidson says the planting of winter wheat south of Highway 1 is quite a bit further ahead than north.
He says there’s been quite a bit of rain to the north so it could be a little more difficult there but things should be pretty good from Highway 1 south.
