By Bruce Cochrane.
The Executive Director of Winter Cereals Canada reports the fall seeded cereal crops planted in Manitoba and Saskatchewan appear to have come through an extremely mild winter in excellent condition with minimal damage.
The number of acres seeded to winter wheat in Manitoba fell last fall to about 200,000 but held steady in Saskatchewan at about 240,000.
Jake Davidson, the Executive Director of Winter Cereals Canada, says this past winter was quite mild so the fall seeded crops that were planted faced minimal cold stress.
Jake Davidson-Winter Cereals Canada:
Throughout the winter we have temperature probes in fields across Manitoba and Saskatchewan and, from what we can see from the data gleaned from those probes, none of the fields that we were monitoring had a significant cold stress and only in 1 field did we even come close.
We feel that the overall winter stress was minimal.
Now we're coming through a rather interesting spring where we're heating up a little bit, cooling off, heating up, getting funny little snowfalls, a lot of moisture, but nothing that's severe as far as snapping back down to a really hard frost or anything.
We're expecting that once this funny up down spring we're having, finally maybe the weather is going to straighten out and warmer days are starting to come along we expect to see the crop starting to move so, so far, we are very pleased.
Davidson says we have places in Saskatchewan where there was not a lot of snow where a week or two ago the crops were starting to green up a little bit.
He says growers in Saskatchewan haven't experienced the same up and down as those in Manitoba but, all in all, we're looking forward to a good start this year.
Source: Farmscape