The Executive Director of Winter Cereals Canada says winter cereal growers are counting on a smooth growing season that will allow a rebound in acres available for planting fall seeded cereal crops this coming fall.
Thanks to a an exceptionally mild winter the fall seeded crops planted in Manitoba and Saskatchewan last fall have come though the winter with minimal winter kill.
Jake Davidson, the Executive Director of Winter Cereals Canada, observes data collected from probes located in fields across Manitoba and Saskatchewan indicate none of the fields that were monitored had significant cold stress and in only 1 field did temperatures even come close so, despite limited snow cover, overall winter stress was minimal.
Statistics Canada numbers say Manitoba was in the 200,00 range. Saskatchewan was about 30,000 to 40,000 higher which seems to be where we’ve been plodding along the last couple of years because of our rather unusual springs and falls that have either ended up with us having multiple seedings of our main cover crop which was canola resulting in late harvest or funny falls.
What we’ve got is a situation where we just haven’t had the ideal planting opportunity at this point.
A good spring that gets us going, gets the spring crops into the soil, we don’t go through that reseeding episode that we had last year where some people reseeded their canola 3 times, canola will go in on time, will come off on time and there will be ample opportunity to seed winter whet in the fall. ~ Jake Davidson-Winter Cereals Canada
Davidson notes CDC Falcon, which had made up over 80 percent of Manitoba’s crop, was moved from the select class into the general purpose class a couple of years ago d so we’ve seen a shift away from Falcon to AC Emerson in Manitoba while in Saskatchewan we’ve seen a lot of moats.
He says Emerson is an excellent milling variety and has the fusarium resistant rating and so it’s gaining in popularity.
