Manitoba Agriculture reports the 2017 planting season is getting off to a slow start, the result of abundant moisture.
Manitoba Agriculture issued its first crop report of the season Monday.
Rejean Picard, a Farm Production Extension Specialist Crops with Manitoba Agriculture, reports some seeding finally got started this past week but, so far, progress has not been significant.
I think most regions report very good moisture conditions to start. If we go back to last season we’ve had a fairly moist, actually well above average moisture conditions for many parts of the province and so the saturation levels of soils was quite high going into fall and some regions have had significant rainfall in the fall, especially the Northwest so soils are at good levels in terms of moisture going into spring.
We haven’t had much precipitation this spring and so things are progressively drying up. That moisture level in the soil is good to start which is a good thing to have a reserve to begin with but it’s also, to some extent, delaying the start of seeding because some of that moisture takes longer to dry up and to warm up. That’s delaying a little bit, especially in the Southwest and the Northwest Regions. That’s been a bit of an issue.
Hopefully that will change and, as we get into this week, we’re seeing good weather conditions in the forecast and I think every day we’ll see more and more fields being fit for machinery and being accessed by growers to put their crops in.
Rejean Picard-Manitoba Agriculture
Picard noted that since the weekend there has been an improvement in the weather which is improving drying and warming up the fields. He’s confident that there will be an acceleration of seeding this week.
