Manitoba Agriculture reports, that as of October 24, 94 percent of the crop had been harvested in the province with only a few acres of grain corn and silage corn left to be harvested.
Sonia Wilson, an oilseed specialist with Manitoba Agriculture, says high amounts of rain delayed spring seeding, particularly in the northwest and then in June intense rain caused extensive flooding in the northwest and Interlake regions.
I know that there’s still infrastructure and field repair being done to this day and that also provided a bit of a challenge for harvest as well in those areas. Once crops were established, we also had some very high temperature days in July as well, with one of the highest temperatures being reached in the middle of July and temperatures generally returned to just slightly above normal in August.
We also had some rainfall during the harvest season as well, which I’ve shared about on the previous weeks that really kind of pushed harvest back from our typical. As harvest kept going, we had great quality coming off and about average to above average yields in most crops and then with, again, those late rainfalls that I mentioned, we did see a bit of a drop in terms of quality for some of those later fields, especially cereals that were coming off.
We saw some grading issues, especially in some pre-harvest sprouting, just general quality and dockage as well in terms of sclerotia and canola. So, those are some of the sticking points that we saw in this harvest.
~ Sonia Wilson, Manitoba Agriculture
Wilson says cereal crop quality was good in the earlier harvested crops and then dropped due to weathering and there was some sprouting, it appeared to be a good year for corn but reporting is still limited, canola experienced some disease issues and yields were below average to average, soybean yields were average to above average and pea yields are reported as average but they had good quality.
