Farmscape for September 21, 2011   (Episode 3668)

The Canadian Wheat Board reports, despite this year's difficult growing season, the 2011 western Canadian cereal crop is coming off the fields in excellent condition.

A late spring followed by abundant intermittent rain and flooding delayed seeding, slowed crop growth and resulted in an estimated six and a half million acres of prairie cropland going unseeded.

Stuart McMillan, a weather and crop analyst with the Canadian Wheat Board, says after the very slow start, we've made up for it in the end.

Clip-Stuart McMillan-Canadian Wheat Board:
Harvest progress has been quite rapid this year.

We've currently got about three quarters of the crop off and in the bin and perhaps even a little bit further than that now.

Quality has been very good.

We had an extremely hot and dry August which really gave us sort of the dry finish.

We avoided the majority of fusarium and other sort of leaf diseases.

We didn't see a lot of that.

That certainly did influence the fact so quality I think is going to end up ahead of average so we'll have probably over 70 percent ones and twos I would expect and, in some cases, say in Manitoba, I wouldn't surprised if we end up close to 85 percent ones and twos on the wheat side.

So far our barley quality has been quite good as well.

The one area we've been slightly poorer, less than average would be on the protein so we are seeing some lower protein so certainly the quality is excellent.

The one concern we are seeing, the main downgrading factor has been ergot and that's fairly widespread across central, western Manitoba, the vast majority of Saskatchewan is showing up with ergot and we're even getting a few samples showing up out of southern Alberta with ergot.

McMillan expects this year's wheat production to be very close to the five year average but he expects overall barley supplies and oat supplies to be well below the five year average.

He says, although the little bit of rain that's come through will slow things down a bit, this year's harvest is moving along about three times faster than last year and ahead of the long term average.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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