Manitoba Agriculture reports the 2018 harvest has turned out to be about average in terms of both crop quality and yields.
With this year's harvest estimated at 97 percent complete, Manitoba Agriculture has released its 2018 Seasonal Summary.
Anastasia Kubinec, the Manager of Crop Industry Development with Manitoba Agriculture, says overall yields are about average.
Clip-Anastasia Kubinec-Manitoba Agriculture:
With the dry conditions that we did have some of the crops that did suffer for yields were things like winter wheat because we did not have that early season moisture that the winter wheat needed to access nitrogen, get that early growth and set yield at those early stages.
In some areas peas were lower yielding than normal as well, again due to early season moisture and then moisture at the flowering and the pod fill stage.
If it's not there that crop does not yield that great.
That's the same thing for soybeans too and that was more a lack of moisture in the end of the season when the soybeans are podding and forming those seeds and then seed size.
Those were the three crops that really seemed to be reduced in yield this year.
That was really across the province and, even within some of the regions, there could be areas that were higher yielding and areas that were much lower yielding just because of where the rain fell and the moisture holding capacity was of those soils.
Crops that seemed to fare very well this year were things like spring wheat, oats, barley, sunflowers.
Those crops are ones that can root to an incredible depth, six or eight feet into the soil.
They were able to access what ever soil moisture was there, reserves in the deeper parts of the soil and they took advantage of when the rainfall came.
It seemed to come at the right times for those crops, so at heading and flowering and seed fill and they seemed to yield average or much above average.
Kubinec says losses from insects and disease were much lower than we would typically see but we did have a few hail storms that resulted in substantial losses.
Source : farmscape