Higher Cereal Grain and Oilseed Acres Reported at the Expense of Special Crops

By Bruce Cochrane

A weather and crop specialist with CWB reports, despite this year's late start to spring seeding, the majority of prairie farmers were able to get the crops they wanted to grow planted.

Despite this year's extremely late spring dry weather during most of May allowed western Canadian farmers to get the their crops planted, on average, about ten days behind normal.
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Bruce Burnett, a weather and crop specialist with CWB, reports we saw an increase in the number of acres planted to cereal grains and oilseeds at the expense of special crops.

Bruce Burnett-CWB:
In terms of what got planted this year, according to Stats Can, we saw a larger area devoted to wheat and a small area devoted to canola, an increase in some crops like soybeans as well.

All of these were pretty well anticipated so basically the area sown to the cereal crops went up slightly and oilseeds crops on net also went up a bit with some of specialty crops dropping off in terms of the total area devoted to those crops in western Canada, One of the concerns here is how much damage has this wet weather caused in terms of the harvestability of some of these crops.

We will have lost some areas due to the heavy amounts of moisture that we received in western Manitoba and eastern parts of Saskatchewan.

Burnett says winter cereal crops and early spring crops are heading now which, depending on how much heat we get, would push harvest dates for the early seeded crops into late August while the later seeded crops will be harvested well into September so there will be a wide range of harvest dates.

Source: Farmscape