Farmscape for June 26, 2015

Saskatchewan Agriculture reports dry weather has started to reduce yield potentials across the province.
Although some areas in Saskatchewan received rainfall last week, significant rain is still needed in many areas to help the development of crops, hay and pasture.
Shannon Friesen, a cropping management specialist with the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture, reports crop development is delayed in many areas due to cool dry weather.

Clip-Shannon Friesen-Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture:
As usual we have quite a wide variety of crops planted this year, quite a few canola acres as well as cereals.
Pulses are also up.
Certainly with some of those canola crops, a lot of them were actually hit hard by some frost damage so we did see quite a bit of reseeding happening.
At the moment crop development is quite slow.
We're still at the normal stages of development for this time of year but things have been very much delayed, mainly due to a lack of moisture.
Even when we compare to a typical year, we are maybe slightly behind where we would normally be.
For the most part things are growing where there is moisture.
Even within fields and right across the province stages vary.
We still have quite a bit of crop just emerging but we also have quite a bit of that crop also fully maturing and entering some of that heading and bolting stages in the canola.
Emergence was very very patchy this year so, even in some cases in some fields, we have 3 or 4 different crop stages within that.
Of course even though we were able to get into fields early this year because the snow actually melted on time, it's been very very dry so things haven't been growing as well as we would like.

Friesen says areas on the western side of the province and areas to the south are especially short of topsoil moisture, while the eastern areas have had a little more rain and are doing a little bit better.
She says last week's rains were too late for some so yields are expected to be average at best with many producers reporting they're expecting below average yields.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork