Farmscape for December 14, 2016

The Executive Director of Winter Cereals Canada says winter wheat continues to provide a dramatic yield advantage over wheat varieties planted in the spring, and that spread can be expected to widen.
Winter wheat is planted in the fall shortly after harvest, typically on canola stubble, and lays dormant over the winter before taking off in the spring as the weather warms up.
Jake Davidson, the Executive Director of Winter Cereals Canada says winter wheat typically provides a dramatic yield advantage over the spring seeded wheat varieties and the crop harvested in 2016 was pretty consistent with that trend.

Clip-Jake Davidson-Winter Cereals Canada:
According to Statistics Canada overall on the Canadian prairies spring wheat did 43.8 and winter wheat did 51.1 bushels per acre.
That still leaves us with a considerable yield improvement over spring wheat.
Manitoba saw winter wheat at 61.4 and spring wheat at 49.5.
Saskatchewan had a bit of a rough year this year.
They were 39.2 both winter and spring, because of the growing conditions.
Alberta showed a spring wheat of 47.2 bushels per acre versus winter wheat of 55.3
Over all across the prairies, and if you look at the many years average, winter wheat significantly out yielding spring wheat again this last year.
With our new varieties coming out and new agronomy, that spread should continue and possibly grow.

Davidson says the quality of the crop appears to be fairly decent with not a lot of fusarium and fairly decent protein levels.
He says sometimes, even though you've got great quality, it will end up going somewhere where the quality won't affect the premium but overall those people who did get the crop off were fairly pleased and judging by the levy numbers, the crop is moving at a fairly good rate.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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