Manitoba Agriculture reports farmers across the province made good progress with the harvest over the past week.
Manitoba Agriculture released its weekly crop report Tuesday.
Anne Kirk, a Cereal Crop Specialist with Manitoba Agriculture, reports minimal precipitation over much of the province allowed good harvest progress in most parts of Manitoba.
For most of the week we did see some pretty good harvest progress throughout the province. We did have minimal precipitation over most of the province so this allowed harvest to continue. In some areas where it was wetter, such as in the southwest region from the previous week, farmers were back in the fields by the end of last week.
The cereal and canola harvest is pretty much complete, soybeans are near completion and harvest of grain corn and sunflowers is just starting.
For sunflowers and corn, we really just saw those getting started in the central region this week so we do have quite a bit of that crop left to take off.
We still do have flax to harvest as well so, when harvest will be complete really just depends on the weather that we’re going to see in the next few weeks and how quickly farmers will be able to get that crop off.
Crop quality has continued to be good throughout the harvest. Throughout much of the province we did see the cereal crops harvested for the most part before we experienced quite a lot of rain so harvest quality for those crops is quite good.
For the soybeans we are seeing some smaller seeds and that’s just as a result of the drier conditions they experienced throughout the growing season.
I don’t have any reports so far on quality of sunflowers and corn.
~ Anne Kirk-Manitoba Agriculture
Kirk notes we’re experiencing shorter days and cooler nights which means there less time where there isn’t dew on the ground to get things off so we’ll have to see what the weather looks like for the next few weeks. She says prior to the rain farmers were holding off on fall field work due to dry conditions but now that there is moisture people are applying anhydrous ammonia, harrowing and doing soil sampling.
