Farmscape for May 12, 2016

A cropping management specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture reports seeding progress is running well ahead of the long term average.
Saskatchewan Agriculture released it's weekly crop report for the period from  May 3 to May 9, 2016 earlier today.
Shannon Friesen, a cropping management specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture, reports planting is running well ahead of the long term average with the Southwest and Southeast regions being the most advanced.

Clip-Shannon Friesen-Saskatchewan Agriculture:
Thanks to a nice stretch of very warm and very dry weather producers were able to seed 35 percent of the crop up until May 9.
Certainly we have had some heavy ran in the last couple of days that has halted progress but producers should be back in the field hopefully in the next couple of days to a week.
We managed to be able to get into the field a lot earlier this year.
Of course we did not have much snow cover over the winter and of course the melt was very quickly in parts of the province.
The south, we didn't really have a whole lot of snow heading into that March-April time period so farmers were not only able to get into the field earlier but the soil temperatures were also warming up a lot quicker than normal as well.
Across the province, in the Southwest Region they now have 58 percent of the crop seeded.
The Southeast has 51 percent, 26 percent in the West Central Region, 23 percent in the Northeast, 21 percent in the Northwest and 17 percent in the East Central region.
We are well ahead of average and well ahead of where we have been over the long term.
Our 5 year average is only 10 percent.
Last year at this time we were 34 percent so we're certainly well ahead of average.

Friesen says farmers will hopefully get back out on the fields within the next couple of days but there will be timely rains needed throughout the growing season.
She says, once farmers are back in the fields, seeding progress should go hard and hopefully should be wrapped up in the next 3 to 4 weeks.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork