Farmscape for August 14, 2017

A Cropping Management Specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture says weather related challenges this year have taken a dramatic toll on crops throughout the province.
Saskatchewan Agriculture released its weekly crop report for the period from August 1 to August 7 Thursday.
Shannon Friesen, a Cropping Management Specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture, says we've had a little bit of everything weather-wise this year.

Clip-Shannon Friesen-Saskatchewan Agriculture:
Many areas have seen high levels of hail damage, anywhere from slight damage all the way to crops being completely written off.
We've had some localized flooding in parts of the north and, of course with the dry conditions, we've seen a lot of severely damaged fields in some parts as well.
For the most part producers have either been combining or actually actively switching some of their grains over to feed as we also have a hay shortage in parts of the south as well.
Certainly most livestock producers were not able to have a second cut of hay and the pasture growth has been very limited as well.
We are doing much better quality wise than we have in last couple of years, mostly because it really hasn't rained that much at harvest.
Of course anything can happen still but, for the most part, we're not seeing the high levels of fusarium that we had last year as well a lot of the bleaching and the staining so much of our pulse crop is coming off in relatively good condition however yields have been much less than what we would have hoped and compared to our long term average we will be probably about average to below average overall.
In comparison to last year, I think last year was our third biggest crop that we've had, so it will be significantly less.

Friesen says overall things are quite variable depending on location, in some cases better and in some cases much worse.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork