Farmscape for April 25, 2012   (Episode 4136)

The Canadian Wheat Board reports, despite unusually warm March weather, spring seeding is close to on par with normal.

It looked like an unusually early spring melt would allow farmers to start seeding early but a return to more typical weather has brought work closer to normal.

Canadian Wheat Board weather and market analysis director Bruce Burnett says we're seeing cereal crops starting to go in and the odd field of canola mostly in the southern regions.

Clip-Bruce Burnett-Canadian Wheat Board:
In March temperatures were well above normal across the prairie region during the month of March and temperatures that were the warmest or showed the largest deviation from what normal temperatures are were around the eastern half of the prairies.

Manitoba was five to seven degrees Celsius above normal during the month and that caused the snow to melt and everybody got very optimistic about early seeding.

Then we reverted to what you can only say is a more typical weather pattern for this time of year during the month of April.

We've seen a combination of rain and snow and cooler temperatures intermixed with some warm spells during the month but overall we're going to end up fairly close to normal during the month of April here.

We're starting to see some seeding progress moving on the southern parts of the prairies which would be fairly typical for this time of year.

So, despite the strange start-up, we're sort of where we should be at this point of time.

Burnett says topsoil moisture is good in most areas for seeding but areas along the Alberta Saskatchewan border are dry and need rain.

He says subsoil moisture is very good in the eastern prairies but areas from west central Saskatchewan to northwestern Alberta have a significant subsoil moisture deficit and will need timely rains after planting to keep yield prospects from dipping.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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