Soybean Harvest Nearing The Finish Line

Farmers have been taking advantage of the warm weather this week to push ahead with harvest.

This week's crop report notes the province's soybean harvest is 89 per cent complete.

Dennis Lange is a pulse specialist with Manitoba Agriculture.

"It was so dry this year that we were initially kind of looking at potential yields in that 25 to 30 bushel range as far as an average," he said. "Maybe a little closer to 25 bu/acre. As we got into harvest though, it was quite interesting to see that the yields were, in some areas, much better than expected. Not to say there wasn't 12 and 15 bushel yields out there, but there were lots of soybean yields reported anywhere from 30 to over 40 bushels an acre. At the end of the day, we're probably looking at pretty close to about a 30 bushel average across the province this year."

Lange says the quality of the soybean crop has been quite good for the most part. The only real issue in both soybeans and dry beans was late season regrowth in some fields.

He commented on yield numbers for dry beans.

"The yields that I'm hearing right now are anywhere from 800 to 1,200 lbs/acre. In the good areas where they've got more rainfall, those yields are in that 1,600 to 1,800 lbs/acre. Overall quality is good. No real issues other than a little bit of bacterial blight in some of the samples here and there but nothing to be of any concern with right now. Overall, we're probably going to be looking at maybe a 1,200 to 1,300 lbs/acre average yield for this year. A normal five-year average is 1,700 lbs/acre."

Lange says for field peas, provincially, the yield will be somewhere around 40 bushels per acre. Overall, he notes the quality of the field pea crop was good.