Crop Condition Assessment Program, 2013

Despite a delayed snow melt across most of the Prairie region this spring, producers managed to get most of their crops in the ground by the end of May.

Recent ground frost occurred in many parts of Ontario, affecting the emerging corn. Frost damage to the Ontario soybeans was limited as most of the crop had not yet emerged.

Weekly satellite images processed by Statistics Canada and distributed on the Crop Condition Assessment Program (CCAP) website show that growing conditions within agricultural regions are behind normal in southern Manitoba, central and south-western Saskatchewan and western Alberta. Growing conditions in Ontario are rated as normal. Conditions are below normal in south-western Quebec, but they are normal for most of the other agriculture regions in the province. Growing conditions are normal in the Atlantic provinces.

The CCAP is a free web mapping application that provides timely, objective cropland and pasture monitoring information on a weekly basis for Canada's entire agricultural region, along with the northern part of the United States.

The application combines state-of-the-art satellite remote sensing with geographic information systems and dynamic web mapping technologies. It is the longest running near real-time, operational, web-based crop and pasture condition monitoring program in Canadian history.

An additional satellite data source with an improved resolution of 250 metres, implemented in 2010, is available in the 2013 edition of the CCAP.

Satellite imagery is received every Monday from early April until mid-October. Weekly updates are made to the web application within minutes of receiving the satellite data for near real-time use by the entire agriculture community.

Current conditions are compared with a 26-year normal, allowing easy mapping of areas under stress, such as drought, flooding or frost events. The application includes other products such as thematic maps and data in graph and tabular format for four types of different geography layers, from the census agriculture region to the township level. The entire historical database from 1987 onward is included in the application.

Also included for the Prairie region is an experimental yield forecast for spring wheat, durum wheat, barley and canola that will be updated in August. These yield forecast models use historical yield estimates and current satellite image data to estimate crop yields in near real time.

Source: Statistics Canada