Early Harvest Underway in Manitoba

Farmscape for July 31, 2019

Manitoba Agriculture reports the first fields of fall rye and winter wheat are now being harvested in the very southern areas of the province.
Manitoba Agriculture's weekly crop report, released yesterday, indicates crop development continues to advance thanks to moisture and heat over the past three weeks and the very first fields of fall rye and winter are being harvested.
Anastasia Kubinec, the Manager of Crop Industry Development with Manitoba Agriculture, says we are seeing quite a bit of variation, depending on how much moisture was received.

Clip-Anastasia Kubinec-Manitoba Agriculture:
For moisture we did receive a generalized rain but at low amounts.
The eastern region received more than the rest of the province.
For rainfall itself, we are sitting anywhere from the driest areas being at about 50 percent of normal rainfall to the wetter areas being in about that 115 percent.
Within each of the regions of Manitoba we do have a wide variation of rainfall that has been received over the season.
The driest regions still remain to be the Interlake, an area around the east and south side of the Riding Mountain National Park and there are pockets in other regions as well.
As for heat accumulation, we are sitting fairly close to normal.
Most areas have received at least 90 percent of their normal heat accumulation, where we do have a few areas that are upwards of 100 percent, so slightly cooler than what we would have in other years but normal.
A lot of that reduction where the heat is would have been the really cool weather that we would have received in May and the beginning part of June.

Kubinec says most of the crop damage has been caused by grasshoppers but there have been insecticide applications and producers are encouraged to be monitoring thresholds to determine if spraying is warranted.
She says although there was some early season hail, there have not been any major hail storms reported recently but localized thundershowers that dropped a lot of rain have resulted in crops in low areas being drowned out.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.


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