Farmscape for October 16, 2017

With this year's harvest very close to complete, Saskatchewan Agriculture reports crop quality is the best that farmers have seen in years.
Saskatchewan Agriculture's weekly crop report, released Thursday, indicates 94 per cent of the crop is now in the bin, well ahead of the five year average.
Shannon Friesen, a Cropping Management Specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture, says the northwest region has 87 percent of the crop combined and the northeast and east central regions have 92 percent combined, for the most part the south has wrapped up and the southeastern and west central regions still have a bit of crop out there.

Clip-Shannon Friesen-Saskatchewan Agriculture:
For the most part it's the best quality that we've had in a number of years mainly due to the fact that we've had a very dry harvest.
Over the last couple of years we've had very rainy falls and there's been a lot of issues with sprouting and bleaching and downgrading due to fusarium but luckily this year the majority of the crops are grading in the top two.
In terms of yield, again, those vary greatly right across the province anywhere from well above average to well below average and it all depends on where you are in the province.
For those producers in the south where we did see a long extended period of very dry and very hot weather conditions things have been well below what we would normally expect.
For those areas that got timely moisture yields are looking much better, some of those areas in the northeast as well as the northwest.

Friesen says, in the northeast and east central region a lot of producers have been able to reclaim land that had actually been previously flooded for many years so, even though the dry conditions were not ideal for the province, producers in areas that were always dealing with excess moisture have been lucky enough to able to reclaim some of that land.
She acknowledges, while rain a couple of weeks ago improved soil moisture conditions, significant amounts of rain will be needed to replenish topsoil and subsurface moisture so timely rains once the harvest is complete will be welcomed.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork