Farmscape for August 5, 2014

The executive director of Winter Cereals Canada is advising anyone wanting to plant winter wheat this fall to secure seed supplies as early as possible.
An estimated four million acres of prairie cropland went unseeded this year due to the late spring or were drowned out by excess moisture during the growing season.
Jake Davidson, the executive director of Winter Cereals Canada, anticipates a large number of those acres will be seeded to winter cereal crops this fall.

Clip-Jake Davidson-Winter Cereals Canada:
We in Saskatchewan and Manitoba have hit just over six hundred thousand so we're kind of running at two thirds of where we have been.
We'd like to see a million in both so we're having a little trouble hitting our target that we've set for ourselves but I think it's going to come back this year.
I understand from my seed growers that most of them are almost sold out already.
The demand from people who want to seed the crop into their stubble and non-seeded fields this year is very high.
I have directors telling me that they've already got pretty near everything that they expect to get spoken for.
I think if you want winter wheat seed and you know somebody that grows winter wheat for seed, I would be on the telephone talking to them now and trying to get an allotment because it could be a little tight because, especially if we have a little bit of a quality problem and we have to clean a lot of stuff out and bring it up to grade, that is going to lower the total numbers.

Davidson recommends holding off on planting winter wheat until the third week of August at the earliest or into early September.
He says the crop could take off if there's a lot of moisture and we don't want to use a lot nutrients in the fall that will be needed in the spring.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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