Canola harvest starting to ramp upCanola harvest starting to ramp up

With the possibility of rain later this week, farmers have been pushing to get as many acres harvested as they can.

Justine Cornelsen, Agronomic & Regulatory Services Manager with BrettYoung, gave an update on the canola harvest.

"There's been a few acres come off, which is promising. Bulk of that crop is still not quite mature yet. We've got a lot of it going down in swaths, just due to variance in crop maturity. The forecast has been promising and there hasn't been a frost yet, so hopefully that can last a few more weeks without one of those. Things are coming off. There was a few acres in the southeast corner that were taken off by straight cutting, but we are seeing a lot of that stuff that's been down in a swath for the last few weeks starting to come off. It's moving in the right direction and we've got the forecast to get the job."

She says early yields have been fairly good so far.

"Great for the crops that got established. Variance of course, stuff down kind of at that 30 [bushels per acre] range and then well up over 50, up into the 60 range. There are some really decent yields coming off so far. I imagine some of these crops that are going to come off, maybe this week or into next week are going to be fairly good yielding as well. They're a little bit later maturing. A lot of our stuff didn't get seeded until June, so this is kind of on-time and the forecast has been good. We haven't had lots of big wind storms or anything like that."

Cornelsen says with the lack of frost so far, crop quality has been good as well.

She notes that acres that haven't been cut yet are most likely being left to straight cut, adding a lot more acres have been swathed this year due to the later harvest.