Manitoba Agriculture reports rainfall early last week slowed the harvest before work resumed later in the week. Anne Kirk, a Cereal Crop Specialist with Manitoba Agriculture, says this year’s harvest is running behind the five-year average of 50 percent complete, mostly due to wet harvesting conditions and staging of crops due to spring moisture.
We did have scattered rainfall across the province last week. We did have kind of variable precipitation accumulations across the province so it was wetter at the beginning of last week with the rainfall, but we did have harvest resuming late last week and over the weekend last week. So, we have seen an increase in harvested acres, but not as many as we would like just due to those slow harvest conditions due to the moisture.
Right now, across the province, we’re estimating about 40 percent of harvest has been completed. That’s a rough estimate but for the central, eastern and Interlake region we’re looking at the majority of spring cereals being harvested so ranging from about 85 percent to 98 percent harvested for those crop types. The southwest and northwest, we still do have a significant amount of spring cereals to come off. Overall, spring cereals across the province are about 65 percent to 75 percent harvested. We do estimate that the majority of peas have been harvested, just waiting for some peas in the northwest to be finished. And then for canola, kind of variable across the province depending on the region. In the southwest, we’re about 20 percent, northwest five percent, central and eastern 60 percent to 75 percent and then the Interlake about 35 percent harvested. And then we are seeing dry bean harvest has just started in the central region as well.
~ Anne Kirk, Manitoba Agriculture
Kirk says the moisture is delaying harvest and causing some quality concerns especially with the spring cereals where downgrading due to sprouting and weathering are a factor. She notes fields are still wet so the expectation is that progress will be slowed over the next week.
