Manitoba Harvest Getting Started

Aug 17, 2022

The harvest of winter wheat and fall rye crops is underway in Manitoba, with some barley and dry pea crops also now coming off, according to the latest weekly provincial crop report.

Early yield results are described as average, with crop conditions generally looking good to very good in most parts of the province. In total, less than 1% of the Manitoba crop is in the bin.

Fall rye yields are reported between 45 to 90 bu/acre, averaging between 75 to 85 bu/acre. Straw volumes are high, and swathing is common. Many farmers have commented that they are intending to seed more fall rye this autumn if conditions remain favourable, especially on ground that had been summerfallowed due to excessive moisture.

Winter wheat yield reports are between 60 to 75 bu/acre. Harvest will continue as humidity drops and weather conditions allow in the coming days. Quality has been variable.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids