Manitoba Agriculture reports another two solid weeks of warm dry weather will be needed to complete this year's harvest.
Manitoba Agriculture's weekly crop report, released yesterday, indicates the harvest moved from 80 to 84 percent complete over the past week.
Anastasia Kubinec, the Manager of Crop Industry Development with Manitoba Agriculture, says farmers took advantage of a few days of drier weather, especially in the northwest, but most areas received more rain or snow over the weekend which has shut things down for another couple of days.
Clip-Anastasia Kubinec-Manitoba Agriculture:
We are probably needing two solid weeks of dry weather, warm weather and windy weather.
Initially we're going to need that dry, warm and windy weather to dry down plant material, also to firm up the soils.
That is one thing that producers have been remarking about, that they can get in and combine their crops but in some crops like soybeans where they're having to cut quite low on the plant, with the moist soil conditions, the tires on the combine are starting to go down a little bit and then they're having issues with control of where their header is to make sure that they're not actually pushing dirt and that they're actually cutting the plants.
That is a concern there, so we do need fields to firm up.
We need stalk tissue and the heads or the pods to dry down a bit so we can have fairly good easy threshing out of material out of the head material and hopefully that some of that grain starts coming off as dry so we're not having to use dryers and aeration as much to bring that harvested grain down to a dry moisture basis.
Because a lot of the crop coming off right now is at a damp or even a wet moisture basis.
Kubinec says, in canola, grain corn and sunflowers the quality remains and in soybeans the quality of crops coming off now is actually better than the crop that came off in August because they've had more time and moisture during dry down resulting in less green seed.
Source : farmscape