Manitoba Agriculture reports isolated thunderstorms brought strong winds and intense rain to parts of the province over the past seven days resulting in stops and starts to the harvest.
Sonia Wilson, an oilseed specialist with Manitoba Agriculture, says the harvest is a bit slower this year due to uneven maturity in some fields and more complications because of early season flooding.
We saw a variable precipitation over the past seven days. Most of it came down on overnight of August 30th and 31st. We did have at least one tornado confirmed near Elkhorn at that point, but overall, we’ve just seen some rains and isolated thunderstorms and strong winds as well, variably over the province so it definitely has been kind of stop and go with harvest depending on how much rainfall has been received.
At this point most of the winter cereals are completely harvested in basically all regions. There’s still a little bit of winter wheat in the southwest and then producers have turned their attention now to spring wheat, barley, oats, and I should mention as well field peas as well are pretty much harvested in most regions other than the northwest and some in the Interlake. So as mentioned the spring cereals are being focused on right now and then upcoming will be canola likely followed by soybeans depending on seeding dates.
Overall, as a province we are sitting at around that 15 percent, 11 to 15 percent somewhere in there harvested, but with that very likely to jump quite a bit over this next week ahead.
~ Sonia Wilson, Manitoba Agriculture
Wilson says the winter cereal report indicates most of the crops were slightly below average in terms of yield, early reports suggest spring cereals are below average to average, with the majority of peas harvested yields have been average with good quality and there has not been enough canola harvested to make an estimate.
