Farmscape for May 6, 2014

A weather and crop specialist with CWB reports seeding is now underway in much of the southern prairies and is expected to become fairly general over the next week to ten days.
Preparations for spring planting are now well underway across the prairies with some seed starting to go into the ground.
Bruce Burnett, a weather and crop specialist with CWB, reports once again this year things have gotten off to a slow start.

Clip-Bruce Burnett-CWB:
It looks like another slow start to spring reminiscent of last year, although in a lot of areas we didn't have quite nearly the same amount of snow cover as we did last year.
Certainly the temperatures have been fairly similar, that they've been below normal through most of April and into the early part of May here now.
In terms of field work we're starting to see some field work start up in the southern prairies, especially parts of southern Alberta, southern Saskatchewan especially the southwestern corner of Saskatchewan.
Those areas are now seeing some seeding going on and in the next week or so we should probably see good progress as long as those areas don't receive too much rain that seems to be forecast for this week.
Elsewhere, in the central and northern prairies, it's rather slow going right now.
Most of the fields are too wet, soil temperatures are too cool to make significant progress but we would expect during the next week to ten days that we'll see activity pick up rather significantly in those regions as well.

Burnett says soil moisture reserves are fairly good this year.
He acknowledges dryness had been a concern in the northern prairies and, while there wasn't a lot of snow cover to begin with, precipitation picked up in the latter part of winter and good rains in the early spring that moved into the northern and central prairies have significantly improved the situation.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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