A weather and crop specialist with CWB reports, despite this year’s late start to spring planting, the majority of prairie farmers will be able to plant the crops they had intended to plant.
As a result of the late spring planting got underway across the prairies much later this year than last year but, for the most part, dry weather throughout May has allowed farmers to catch up.
Bruce Burnett, a weather and crop specialist with CWB, says farmers will be looking for another week or so to complete planting, after which general rains will be welcome.
At the beginning of the week, from a prairie wide perspective, we were just a little bit over 70 percent complete on the prairies which is a good start to the seeding year.
The late start has slowed things below normal but certainly the weather has cooperated quite a bit.
For the most part farmers have been able to plant the crops that they expected to.
Again we’re expecting a larger wheat area, a larger soybean area certainly in Manitoba, a smaller area devoted to canola, barley and some of the other crops.
Certainly the concerns we had about late seeding and forcing farmers to switch hasn’t happened yet.
In Manitoba we have received some very heavy rains in the south central areas of the province and in some of those areas, especially with more rains in the forecast, we probably will be looking at some of those acreage areas being switched maybe to alternate crops, especially those that were going to be planted to corn or soybeans.
Burnett notes less than ideal planting conditions last fall translated into some loss of acres of fall seeded crops.
He says, because of poor stand establishment, some growers have decided to rip up winter wheat fields and reseed to spring wheat or some other crop.
