Farmscape for September 6, 2011   (Episode 3657)

A winter wheat breeder with the University of Manitoba reports this year's difficult spring planting season has heightened the level of interest in planting fall seeded crops.

The 2011 growing season has been characterized by a late spring followed by excessive moisture and flooding which delayed planting and resulted in an estimated six and a half million acres of prairie cropland being left unseeded.

Dr. Anita Brûlé-Babel, a winter wheat breeder with the University of Manitoba, says she has been getting questions from farmers since June about how to plan for winter cereals given farmers were not able to get onto the land to plant spring seeded crops.

Clip-Dr. Anita Brûlé-Babel-University of Manitoba:
Fall seeded crops have a lot of advantages.

Again, soil conservation is one of them because you have something that's holding the soil in place over the winter and that's a very important part of the equation.

In terms of management and workload management the fact that we've had some very wet springs that have been difficult to get into the ground with spring seeded crops, the nice thing about winter seeded crops or fall seeded crops is that they're ready to go as soon as the weather turns nice in the spring and you're not struggling trying to get them into the ground during the spring.

That also helps considerably.

Varying your growth habit of your crop also helps with weed management and disease management as well because the spectrum of weeds that are important with winter crops is different from spring crops and so changing what you're doing is always a good idea from a management point of view.

Ducks Unlimited supports a lot of winter wheat work because it provides extra habitat for nesting of waterfowl in the spring because you're not doing tillage operations during the nesting period of those waterfowl and so there are advantages there as well in terms of just providing a better habitat.

Dr. Brûlé-Babel notes winter wheat yields on average are 25 to 40 percent higher than spring wheat yields so if prices are good and you've got a good market that also provides benefits.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council