Saskatchewan Farmers Closing in Completion of Spring Planting

Saskatchewan Agriculture reports the majority of farmers across the province are expecting to complete spring planting over the next week or so.Saskatchewan Agriculture released its weekly crop report Thursday for the period from May 20th to 26th.Tyce Masich, a Crops Extension Specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture, says seeding is now 88 percent complete throughout the province, which above the five and ten-year average.

Quote-Tyce Masich-Saskatchewan Agriculture:

It's been a pretty dry week here in Saskatchewan relative to the last week.There was some rainfall in areas of the northwest, which they were happy to see.
Then the southeast got a little bit of rain as well but other than that the rest of the province has been fairly dry so producers were able to get out into the fields and get lots of seeding done again this week in many places and many producers are wrapping up seeding.It's good to see that seeding progress is a little bit ahead of normal.

The main crops that are already in are the pulse crops, so peas and lentil crops are nearly all in.It's the same with all the spring seeded cereal crops, so your durums, spring wheats, oats, most of those crops are in right now.Producers are mainly focussed on getting their last few canola acres in and producers that plant soybeans are also working hard to get those in as well.

Then there's a few producers here and there that are seeding perennial and annual forages.I expect that most producers in the province will wrap up seeding within the next week so I expect that next week we'll see another big jump in seeding progress.Then producers that have already had their crops in the ground for a couple of weeks, I expect that they'll get into in crop herbicide spraying within the next week or two as well.

Masich notes the southeast region of the province has gotten the most rainfall in the province so far so soil moisture conditions in most of the southeast are in good shape, either surplus or adequate.However, he says, other areas, including the northeast, northwest and along the Alberta Saskatchewan border, topsoil moisture conditions are getting fairly dry so producers would like to see a good rain to replenish soil moisture levels.