Good year for winter wheat

It's been a good year for Manitoba's winter wheat crop.

Alex Griffiths is an Agrologist with Ducks Unlimited Canada.

"This year in the western part of the province, there was about 5,300 acres on our program that I've been scouting. Scattered from Melita to Roblin to Clearwater. Of that, about 5,000 acres were kept in, so it ended up being a really good year, especially considering all those Colorado lows snows. Most of the areas that were affected by winter kill were your usual culprits. The hilltops where blowing made for exposed soil or drowned out spots from all the water that we got. There was a couple of fields with snow mould, which was not often seen on a large scale and in some cases, it even caused a full field write-off."

Griffiths says currently the crop is at the boot stage with some of it starting to head out. With plenty of moisture and dense canopies, there has been lots of visible leaf disease. Many producers have sprayed foliar fungicide with their herbicide or at flag leaf timing.

He notes there was some reseeding, which went to spring wheat because it was already fertilized for that and the odd one went to soybeans because they can handle the wet and the warm that we had.

Overall most producers who did seed winter cereals this year are very happy that they did that, especially with the precipitation causing such major seeding difficulties.