Farmscape for August 25, 2016

Manitoba Agriculture reports, despite the abundant rainfall this season, the number of Fusarium damaged cereal crop samples has been lower than had been feared.
With Manitoba's harvest of fall seeded cereals virtually complete and the harvest of the spring seeded cereals well underway, early indications are that yields are well above the five year average and, given the abundant rain, quality is better than expected.
Pam de Rocquigny, a Cereal Crop Specialist with Manitoba Agriculture, reports we were seeing some symptoms of Fusarium Head Blight in the field but it hasn't translated into higher levels of Fusarium damaged kernels within the samples harvested so far.

Clip-Pam de Rocquigny-Manitoba Agriculture:
For our winter wheat and our spring wheat and our barley crops as well we were hearing earlier in the season that we were seeing symptoms of Fusarium Head Blight within those crops.
In any given year we will always have disease pressure here within the province of Manitoba.
We're maybe seeing a little bit higher disease pressure this year and that's just been a function of the weather that we've received this year.
It seems every three days we've been getting rainfall and those warm wet conditions also favor disease infections so we've definitely seen that as well.
In terms of impact on yields and quality, in terms of the winter wheat we were seeing good quality so that's been good news.
In terms of some of the spring wheat and barley that's been coming off, there has been some reports of some fusarium damaged kernel levels within harvested samples but that's not unusual either.
There will be a little bit of variability and that will depend on the region.
Sometimes it does depend on variety as well.
There's different levels of genetic resistance to Fusarium Head Blight within, not only crop types, but between varieties within crop types as well.
We'll probably get a little bit better handle in terms of what samples are grading once more samples are graded as producers are busy right now in terms of trying to get the crop off and into the bin.

De Rocquigny says a stretch of warm dry weather would be welcomed to help complete the harvest and preserve crop quality.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork