Manitoba Agriculture Releases First Crop Report of 2024

May 06, 2024

Manitoba Agriculture's first crop report of the season indicates an average of two percent of this year crop had been planted across the province before work was interrupted by rain.Manitoba Agriculture released its first crop report of 2024 on Tuesday.

Dennis Lange, a pulse and soybean specialist with Manitoba Agriculture and editor of the provincial crop report, says farmers were just getting started and had in about two percent of the crop before the rain started to fall..

Quote-Dennis Lange-Manitoba Agriculture:

That two percent compares very similar to the five-year average, at two percent as well.Growers that did get started in the last week or so have started with wheat and oats and barley and mostly in the central region where those percentages are upwards of 10 percent for each commodity type.

Other areas are much lower than that but central was a bit further ahead based on the lack of moisture and snowfall through the wintertime and drier conditions.A few farmers have started but now we're in a position that, with the recent rains that we've had, things are pretty much shut down across the province for any planting this week.In the last few days here, we were getting anywhere from 10 to 30 millimetres of rainfall over the period of a week here in most of the growing regions that we cover.

That's going to assist in getting crops off to a good start once we get back to planting in the field.In past years we've started off with drier conditions in spring.In some instances, growers would have had to go a little bit deeper to get that moisture.Now, with this widespread rain across the province, I think once growers get back into the field things are going to roll along quite nicely and we'll be having more adequate moisture levels to start off the season for at least that initial germination.

Lange says up until this current rain event growers were a little bit ahead of last year.He notes things didn't get started until into May last year.
For more visit Farmscape.Ca.Bruce Cochrane.

Source : Farmscape.ca

Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”