Farmscape for March 16, 2015

A weather and crop specialist with CWB expects the early spring melt to allow farmers to plant those acres that went unseeded last year because they remained too wet.
With the early arrival to spring it looks like farmers will be able to get on their land for planting earlier than usual this year.
Bruce Burnett, a weather and crop specialist with CWB, says the good part about this early spring is that, with most of the snow cover melted, it'll allow some of those wetter areas that had experienced flooding last year to dry out in time for planting so we are looking for a more normal acreage situation in those regions.

Clip-Bruce Burnett-CWB:
I think basically areas that we're looking at in terms of profitability is that some of the specialty crops are certainly favored this year.
Some of the pulse crops, peas, field peas for instance, lentils, those types of crops certainly are going to garner extra area.
In parts of the western prairies we're going to see some more durum acreage as well because of the prices that we saw for high quality durum this past year exceeding expectations.
But I think overall this year we're looking at farmers not changing their planting intentions a lot from the previous year but we will see an increase in acreage because we will see some of those flooded acres come back into production and that will benefit all crops, wheat, barley, oats, canola and flax, all of those crops that are grown in those areas that got flooded out.

Burnett says, while the trend towards more special crops and oilseeds will impact feed grain acres, we are looking for an increase in oat and barley acres this year but that's just because of unseeded acres coming back into production, but the earlier start this year does improve our chances of having a higher quality harvest.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane. 

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