Farmscape for October 16, 2009   (Episode 3322)

The recent snow which has stalled harvesting activities across the prairies is expected to result in reduced grades in cereal crops still on the fields.

The 2009 growing season begun late and was one of the coolest on record, which delayed crop development, but it was also one of the longest growing seasons with September being the warmest month of the year.

Canadian Wheat Board weather and market analysis director Bruce Burnett reports just under 90 percent of the wheat, oat and barley crops are now in the bin.

Clip-Bruce Burnett-Canadian Wheat Board:
For 90 percent of the crop the grades have been excellent.

It's mostly been number one or number two and, other than some lower proteins, the wheat quality has been excellent.

The same thing with the initial barley quality as well, a very very good  quality of the crop to date.

Again, for the last parts of this harvest, obviously the grades are going to decline somewhat just because we've seen a lot of weathering on the crops in the past two to three weeks.

We are, with this slower harvest, going to generate more feed quality and again it's going to be mostly in the northern growing areas where this grain is going to be located.

In total, in other words for the whole crop, we're going to see probably a fairly average amount of feed, our longer term average, which is somewhere between five and ten percent of the crop grading feed.

We're going to see probably feed quantities in that range.

The only difference this year is we're going to be the fact that we are going to see it in some fairly concentrated areas especially in northern Saskatchewan.

Burnett says there are questions whether the remaining harvested will be completed and estimates another two to three weeks of warmer drier weather will be needed in October and November.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council