Farmscape for May 7, 2018

Saskatchewan Agriculture expects the province's farmers to be planting the same crops as usual this spring.
Although a cool and late spring delayed field work across Saskatchewan, seeding has gotten underway in the southern areas and will become more general over the next week or so.
Daphne Cruise, a Crop Extension Specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture, says early indications are that farmers plan to stick pretty close to their traditional cropping plans.

Clip-Daphne Cruise-Saskatchewan Agriculture:
We may see a decrease in red lentil acres and I think that's mostly just an indication of the price right now.
Canola seems to increase every year and so their might be some more of that going in and there might be some more acres put into green feed or swatch grazing or even annual grazing, just a reflection on our dry year last year which decreased some forage yields as well as our extended winter that may have depleted some of our forage stocks.
I think at this point, our indications are that our producers aren't really changing any seeding plans at the moment.
It's still the first part of May and so we still have time, especially if the weather cooperates.
Producers can cover a lot of ground in short order.
Depending on how the weather plays out in the next two or three weeks then we may see some changes if it's unfavorable but, for the time being, I think everyone is pretty much staying the course as to what their seeding plans are.
The exception might be our mixed farmers who have both crops and livestock.
Some of those acres that were meant for harvest may be considered to go into feed for livestock just because of our dry year last year, our extended cold winter and then the spring being late with pastures greening up.

Cruise says we might see some more cares go into green feed or swath grazing or even grazing throughout the summer to compensate for some of those forage shortfalls we came across last year and into the winter.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork