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CANADA – A plant science instructor with the University of Manitoba says those crops seeded last fall or early this spring have done much better in terms of yield and quality than those planted later in the season.
The 2012 growing season got off to an early start and production looked good until about mid-June when concerns over dry weather started to emerge.
Gary Martens, a plant science instructor with the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences, says the winter wheat and spring cereal harvests are now complete, the canola is close to finished and we’re now waiting for the harvest of the later season crops – the soybeans, corn and sunflowers – to begin.
Gary Martens said: “I would say, because it has been a fairly dry season, the earlier crops did better. From what I can see winter wheat did very well.
“I’m hearing very good yields, 75 bushels to the acre, in that range and very good quality because there was no rain on it to deteriorate it.
“Then, as we moved into the spring cereals, if you planted your spring cereals early you would have got very good quality but then the later season cereals – I’m talking about the barley and the oats – are lighter in terms of bushel weights, like density.
“They’re not as high quality as they have been but it’s not that they’re rain-degraded or anything like that.
It’s just that they’re not as heavy as they can be.
“The canola, I’m hearing lots of small seeds but the quality is okay.”
Martens says the harvest has gone smoothly with very few rains delays and is ahead of normal for this point in the season which is making it easier for planning.
He notes, with much of the canola harvested, seeding of winter wheat has already begun so we have the potential for a really good start to the winter wheat crop.
TheCropSite News Desk
