Manitoba Agriculture reports farmers across the province made substantial progress this past week in terms of this year’s harvest. Sonia Wilson, an Oilseed Specialist with Manitoba Agriculture, says improved weather conditions allowed the harvest to move forward.
We were able to have quite a bit of harvest happen, which was a lot of relief for producers. We had not necessarily warmer, but drier temperatures, with definitely some wind, but overall, we had a big push towards harvest, particularly in a lot of the finishing up the cereals, as well as the canola acres across the province here. Overall, provincially, we’re sitting at about 65 percent harvested, and of course that is as of October 6th.
What we’re seeing for spring wheat is we still have some acres left, particularly in the southwest. Overall, we’re sitting at 86 percent harvested and similarly around that 90 percent mark for both barley and oats. We know that there have been some concerns about lighter oats being harvested here, and also just the quality of the spring cereals in general, because we have had more moisture. In terms of field peas, all done there and winter cereals as well were all done. Then we have canola sitting at about 74 percent. Then we’ve also seen it turn to soybeans, so about 30 percent across the province. We’ve had pretty good central dry bean harvest as well and then silage corn has been coming off and just started a bit of grain corn and sunflowers, particularly in that central region.
~ Sonia Wilson, Manitoba Agriculture
Wilson says the wet conditions have caused downgrading of cereal crops due to sprouting and general weathering, lodging has caused challenges with the canola harvest and downgrading has been reported while soybeans have been looking good with average to slightly above average yields.
