By Bruce Cochrane
The Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture reports yields of the early harvested crops are well below average but quality has been positive.
The Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture released its weekly crop report yesterday for the period from August 4 to 10.
Shannon Friesen, a cropping management specialist with the Ministry of Agriculture, reports it's been only in the last couple of weeks that the province has received any amount of rain, and in reality, it was 3 to 4 weeks too late and in some cases a month too late.
Clip-Shannon Friesen-Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture:
Certainly harvest progress is well ahead of where we have been the last couple of years.
Provincially 4 percent of the crop is now in the bin and 5 percent has been swathed or is soon ready to straight cut.
The southwest region of the province is well ahead of everyone else.
They have 12 percent of the crop combined, the southeast follows at 3 percent and the rest of the province is at less than 1 percent.
For the most part the crops that have come off so far are our winter cereals, so the winter wheats and the fall rye as well as quite a bit of the peas and the lentils.
Most of these would have been the earlier seeded ones that did not receive the rain, and in fact, some of them may have been flowering while we had quite a lot of heat in the June-July time period.
For the most part the crops looked great and they perked up, especially after the rain but what we are hearing is that, as guys cut into those fields and started to combine, the yields were maybe only half of where they would typically expect it to be, maybe even half of where we were last year, so that's been quite disappointing for most producers.
Of course there's always those fields that yielded better than expected or average but, for the most part, what has come off so far has very much been average to below average in terms of yield.
For quality we are hearing mostly positive things but, of course, a lot of that can change especially if we get some rain this weekend like they're calling for.
Friesen says, for the most part, producers will be looking for continued dry weather now that the harvest is underway, but cooler temperatures.
Source: Farmscape