Farmscape for October 23, 2015

Saskatchewan Agriculture reports, with 97 percent of the harvest now complete, crop yields across the province have been better than expected.
In its crop report for the week of October 13 to 19 Saskatchewan Agriculture reports the provincial harvest in now 97 percent complete, just 1 percent behind the 5 year average.
Shannon Friesen, a cropping management specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture, says, given the lack of early season moisture, yields have been better than expected.

Clip-Shannon Friesen Shannon Friesen-Saskatchewan Agriculture:
Over all, in terms of crop yields, things are very much average.
We are by no means our bumper crop that we had in 2013 or even as high as last year but certainly having an average crop is better than we expected.
Throughout the growing season we had a lot of moisture concerns, especially on that west side of the province but, once we did get the rain, yields were a lot better than we were expecting.
On the east side of the province, particularly in northeast part, even around that Star City Tisdale region we heard many reports of tremendous yields, even record breaking yields for those producers.
Again, they just managed to get the right amount of moisture at the right time.
In terms of quality, again things are average but it really depends on when you were able to take the crop off and when the rains came.
Everything earlier in the harvest year actually came off and was in good quality.
We had lots of number 1 and only some number 2.
Of course then we got rain every week, every 10 days.
That not only shut us down but also caused a lot of issues this year with sprouting and bleaching and staining and things like that so, what has actually come off in the last couple of weeks, will certainly be downgraded.

Friesen says we didn't get any significant rain, particularly on the west side of the province, until the end of July and in some cases it was much too late.
She says a lot of those crops, particularly some of the canola, had already started flowing or podding out by the time the rain came and couldn't take as much advantage of that moisture as some of the cereal or pulse crops.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork