Manitoba Agriculture reports warm weather over the past week advanced crop development but the topsoil is starting to dry out.Manitoba Agriculture released its weekly crop report yesterday.
Dennis Lange, a pulse and soybean specialist with Manitoba Agriculture and editor of the provincial crop report, says the big story over the past week has been the variable moisture with levels ranging from optimal to very dry with some areas in the central, interlake and northwest regions and a few fields around the Carman area experiencing dry conditions but the hot weather has moved crop development along nicely.
Quote-Dennis Lange-Manitoba Agriculture:
Over the last week we haven't seen any major storms that have gone through.Two weeks there was a storm that went through that Rivers area that knocked out some crop there and there was some pretty intense weather but this past week it's been pretty good.
It depends on the crop. Cereals typically, when they go through a major weather event, come through pretty good.Whether it's hail, in particular, they generally come through that pretty good.
Soybeans at early growth stages, if you're getting a slight hail, generally recover pretty nicely but, if you do get hail to a point where it strips the plants right down, then yield losses will be higher.For the most part we haven't seen any widespread damage to any of the crops as of yet.
There are and there will always be insect pests coming in through the growing season so growers are keeping an eye on some of the grasshopper populations.
In some of the forages as well, there's some comments about the grasshopper populations increasing in certain regions and growers are looking at maybe applying some pesticides there.
In past years we've seen grasshopper populations in cereals where growers have had to go in and do some edge spraying or some field spraying depending on where things are at but just keep an eye on fields to make sure you're spraying at the correct time and make sure that populations are high enough that it warrants a spray.
Lange says subsoil moisture is still good but the topsoil is drying out so a general rainfall over the next few days or the next week or so would be very beneficial to most of the crop in Manitoba.
Source : Farmscape.ca