This week's rain may be a few weeks too late, however it may help improve the quality of some crops.
Rick Van Laecke is president and owner of Horizon Seeds Canada. He was showcasing corn varieties this week in Winkler at the Ceres Global Seeds Insight Tour.
"The biggest challenge that we've had in this drought is during pollination period," he said. "The pollination period is set and the ear has been determined. The nice part about this, is the rain that we've got will finish what's there, so what did pollinate will fill its ear out to a decent size and will have enough moisture to finish it out, but the damage has been done," he said.
Morgan Cott, Agronomy Extension Specialist with the Manitoba Crop Alliance, also commented on the corn crop.
"There's good looking corn around. There's nice, tall corn, maturing nicely corn, but the majority of it is pretty uneven and pollination was kind of touchy but it's more plants that produced cobs and got to the reproductive stage, that's what's going to cause our yield loss I think this year. Pollination actually seems to be pretty good, it was just a lot of plants didn't get far enough to get pollinated."
Cott says the corn crop is behind schedule, adding timing could become an issue this fall if we get an early frost.
She also touched on sunflowers.
"Sunflowers are pretty good. They're not struggling too much from what I've seen. Seeds are starting to fill. In some cases, there's some fields that are a little bit further behind. They're definitely stagy, just like everything else. We're a little bit behind normal but I'd say we're looking pretty good for timing for maturity. We just want to get all those plants to the same stage...Sunflowers look fairly promising."
Cott notes for flax, there are some nice fields and some fields that struggled early on in the season and are now recovering.
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