Harvest Moves Ahead as Warm, Dry Conditions Persist

Sep 26, 2025

Warm, dry weather across Alberta has harvest operations moving ahead at a steady clip — but at the expense of much-needed soil moisture, according to the latest crop report.

As of this week, 59 per cent of major crops are now harvested, up 20 points from a week ago. That’s well ahead of both the five-year average of 52 per cent and the ten-year average of 41 per cent.

Regionally, progress looks like this:

South: 67% complete
Peace Region: 61% complete
North West: 59% complete
North East: 56% complete
Central: 53% complete

By crop, harvest is nearly finished for dry peas (98%), and has advanced strongly in spring wheat (75%), barley (75%), and oats (63%). Canola still has the furthest to go at 28% complete, but one-third of fields have already been swathed.

Dry Weather Speeds Harvest, Depletes Moisture

A few scattered showers popped up in the South and Central regions, but overall conditions remain hot and dry. While this has been a boon for combines, it has left soil reserves dwindling — particularly in the North East, North West, and Peace regions, where moisture stress has been an issue all season.

Surface moisture across the province is rated at 29% good to excellent, well below the five-year average of 43%. Sub-surface moisture tells a similar story at 31% good to excellent compared with the five-year norm of 38%.

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Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.