A return to better weather allowed Saskatchewan farmers to make substantial harvest progress over the past week.
Saskatchewan Agriculture released its final weekly crop report yesterday.
Crops Extension Specialist Shannon Friesen says over the last week or so it's finally warmed up and dried up so many farmers have been able to return to the fields and now 92 per pent of the crop is combined, up from 82 percent last week but still slightly behind the five year average.
Clip-Shannon Friesen-Saskatchewan Agriculture:
Most of the winter cereals as well as the pulse crops have now come off but we still have quite a bit of the cereals out there as well as the canola, the flax and the soybeans.
In many areas crops continue to come off tough and they're being placed into dryers when available.
Harvest is most advanced in the southwest region.
97 percent of the crop is now combined down there.
Both the southeast and northeast regions have 95 percent combined, the west central region has 90 percent and the east central region has 89 percent in the bin.
The north west region is our good news story of the week.
Last week they only had about 45 percent of the crop actually combined and this week they were able to almost double that and now have 82 percent of the crop in the bin.
The crop quality isn't what we would like of course.
Much of that crop has been sitting for too long in very cool conditions as well as very wet.
We've had lots of rain and snow over the course of most of September as well as into October so most of our downgrading is actually coming from bleaching as well as sprouting.
Luckily we don't have a lot of disease pressure so we're not really seeing any large amounts of fusarium or anything like that.
Most of the crop damage does tend to be on the cereals but, for some of those immature canola crops, we may have some down grading from high green counts.
Friesen says a summary of this year's crop, including yields and quality, will be released November 8th.
Source : farmscape