Saskatchewan Agriculture reports rainfall over the past week has stalled the harvest and is resulting in downgrading of crops.Saskatchewan Agriculture released its crop report Thursday for the period from September 8th to September 14th.Augustine Osei, a Crops Extension Specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture, says this year's harvest is running well behind the five- and ten-year averages.
Quote-Augustine Osei-Saskatchewan Agriculture:
This past week is there was widespread rainfall and that stalled harvest operations.Currently harvest is 32 percent complete which is just a five percent increase from the last report and this remains well behind the five-year average of 71 percent and 10-year average of 63 percent. Mostly winter cereals and pulse crops and some of the early seeded cereal crops account for most of the crops that have been harvested.
And some of the winter cereals have been completed in some regions but then mostly they are nearing completion but they're is still a bit on the field yet and with the spring ones we still have long ways to go. So, this moisture is impacting harvest in terms of slowing it down and also impacting grain quality.With the grain quality we had in the report here, we compare that to the 10-year average and it looks like the quality is a bit downgraded compared to the 10-year average
Osei says, with all of the moisture, crops still in the field are lodging and beginning to germinate and that is not good for crop grades.
He says farmers are hoping for a stretch of heat to get the fields dried up and allow the harvest to resume.
Source : Farmscape.ca