Farmscape for May 13, 2016

A cropping management specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture reports the province has seen a dramatic improvement in soil moisture conditions since this time one year ago.
Saskatchewan Agriculture's weekly crop report for the period from  May 3 to May 9, 2016, released yesterday, indicates, thanks to a nice stretch of very warm very dry weather, producers have been able to seed 35 percent of the crop up until May 9.
Shannon Friesen, a cropping management specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture, says producers are expected to plant significantly more lentils this year, there's lots of peas going in, lots of mustard as well as canola,  cereal crops including wheat, durum, barley and oats, some canary seed, soybeans and fababeans and some heavy rains in the last couple of days has improved growing conditions.

Clip-Shannon Friesen-Saskatchewan Agriculture:
We are doing better than we were at this time last year.
Last spring we had a very cool spring coupled with a lack of moisture again.
We did not have any significant rain until that later part of July.
And, because we had such a smaller snowfall amount over the spring, we did have some concerns that the topsoil moisture would be drying out very quickly and, for most producers in the south and parts of the West Central Region of the province topsoil moisture conditions were quite short over the past couple of weeks.
But thankfully in the last 2 or 3 days, most of the province did get some moisture.
For some producers it was the most rain they have gotten in 2 or 3 months.
Now that we have this rain we are well ahead of where we were last year but, of course, it doesn't take long in this province for some of that moisture to dry up so hopefully we do continue to get timely rains throughout the year and then it can dry in the fall time for us.

Friesen says, while the rains has delayed planting, they will certainly help get the crops up and growing again.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork