Manitoba Agriculture reports, despite rain delays this past week, the provincial harvest is still running about two weeks ahead of a typical year.
Anastasia Kubinec, the Manager of Crop Industry Development with Manitoba Agriculture, says this past week has been slow for harvest.
We have had a lot of our operations be very slow or stopped due to rainfall, high humidity and cool temperatures which did not allow the crop to continue to dry once the rains ceased. For a typical year we’re probably looking at about two weeks earlier in harvest progress than most years.
With this delay for this past week, that does get us a little bit closer to what we typically would see with harvest. With some of the later crops though we are definitely ahead of schedule. Even with the rain delay we are probably looking at at least two weeks earlier than normal. That would be crops like soybean and grain corn which are being harvested already and typically we would not see harvest occur in those crops until mid to late September and we are already at about 20 percent harvested for that in soybeans and we actually are at about one percent for grain corn.
If the rain had stayed away we probably would have seen combining of sunflowers later last week and this week as well but, with the wet conditions, that reduced the amount of desiccation that could occur or that producers could get into that crop which needs dry conditions because it is quite fleshy until it dries down.
Anastasia Kubinec-Manitoba Agriculture
Kubinec says yields for cereal crops are above average and quality is excellent which is better than what we would typically see in a normal year, in canola we are seeing average yields with excellent quality in line with a typical year, flax yields are very good which was a surprise in a hot year, pea yields were down a little, winter cereal yields were lower due to the dry earlier season conditions and soybean yields are down from the past few years.
