Manitoba Agriculture reports rain over the past week has slowed the harvest and is reducing crop quality.
Manitoba Agriculture released its weekly crop report yesterday.
Anastasia Kubinec, the Manager of Crop Industry Development with Manitoba Agriculture, says intermittent rains and damp cool conditions slowed the harvest.
Clip-Anastasia Kubinec-Manitoba Agriculture:
Some of the crops that there was some pretty good advancement with this week was soybeans.
They hold fairly well, they don't lodge and when producers were getting in with their combines the seed moisture was actually still pretty good and they were able to progress in that.
We've also had a start of the sunflower harvest in Manitoba and that just happened over the past few days with a little bit drier weather and producers were able to get into their sunflower crops that have been desiccated for the past three weeks.
With sunflower progress it's still under five percent in the province but the yields and quality have been very good and moisture has been fairly good as well.
Grain corn has also advanced slightly with producers able to get into corn and taking it off at varying degrees of moisture depending on what the seasonal rainfall was.
Some producers were taking it off at higher moisture but those are the producers that are able to artificially dry with grain dryers in the yard.
Yield results for grain corn have been very good and quality has been good as well.
We've also seen some progress in standing canola where producers were able to combine this past weekend as seed moisture was lower and in some cases was actually getting to be dry by mid-day.
Quality is still very good.
Yield results are good as well.
The only difference in canola being harvested three weeks ago and now is the seed color is not quite as nice and black.
Otherwise the quality and the yields have been really good.
Kubinec says the harvest now stands at about 78 percent complete, about on par with the long term average.
Source : farmscape