Farmscape for August 22, 2013

The Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture reports, despite the slow start to this year's growing season, the majority of the province's farmers are satisfied with the development of this year's crops.
The harvest of the fall seeded cereal crops is now well underway in Saskatchewan, the harvest of the spring seeded cereals is getting into full swing, pulse crops are now being desiccated and the swathing of canola should be fairly general within the next week or so.
Daphne Cruise, a regional crop specialist with the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture, says the normal crops, spring wheat, barley, oats, canola a lot of pulses were planted this year and a little bit more flax because of the delayed start to seeding.

Clip-Daphne Cruise-Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture:
At the beginning of the year we were a little bit behind on seeding progress, more so across the eastern side of the province in southern areas where we had quite a bit of moisture early on during seeding time.
As we moved into the growing season into July most of our conditions were quite cool and quite wet and a lot of the eastern areas and the some of the north was dealing with excess moisture even up until the second part or middle of July.
As it stands right now most of our producers are indicating we're about ten days to two weeks behind from where we would normally like to be this time of year but indications are that they're quite happy and they're predicting yields to be above average in most cases.
There are exceptions in the province, depending on where it was too wet and in some areas along the west side of the province there are some areas that are too dry as well.
It's kind of a hit and miss generalized statement for this time of year but things look good going into harvest.

Cruise says, with crop development running a week to ten days behind normal, warm dry weather will be needed well into the harvest season to get the crops into good condition.
She says we'll have a better idea as we get some of those combines into the fields to get the crop off.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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