Manitoba Agriculture reports warmer temperatures and minimal rainfall allowed farmers to make significant harvest progress over the past week.
Anne Kirk, a cereal crop specialist with Manitoba Agriculture says right now the harvest is sitting at about 72 percent complete.
We had great weather this week for good harvest progress. We had minimal precipitation. The most amount of rain recorded was in the Gardenton area with 5.5 millimeters of rain. Many areas got no rain over the past seven days which was great for harvest. Things were also quite warm so we did see good harvest progress and some longer days for combining.
Basically, what we’re seeing is producers finishing up their final bits of spring cereals so we have a little bit of spring wheat, barley and oats left to combine in the southwest and the northwest but in the central, eastern and Interlake we’re assuming that most people would have finished within the last week or so. We still have canola to harvest so canola is coming off throughout every region as well as soybeans. Canola is looking at about 76 percent harvested overall and soybeans are looking at about 24 percent harvested overall.
In the next week, if the weather is cooperative, I would expect a bigger jump in the canola and soybeans. If we do have some more corn that is appropriately dried down, we will likely see the beginning of corn harvest reflected in next week’s crop report. It really depends on what we see in terms of moisture over the next week. I know many areas have rain predicted over the weekend so that will obviously put a hamper in harvest progress.
~ Anne Kirk, Manitoba Agriculture
Kirk says, depending on the amount of moisture received, we are seeing a range of crop yields with spring wheat averaging above 60 bushels per acre and up to 90 or 100 bushels in areas that received timely rain, oats from 100 to 130 bushels per acre and barley about 65 to 110 bushels. She says crop quality is generally good but spring cereals that sat out in areas that received higher amounts of rain have been downgraded and there have been some poorer quality oats due to too much moisture.
