Farmscape for May 13, 2015

Manitoba Agriculture, Food and Rural Development reports spring seeding across the province has now passed the halfway point.
Spring seeding across Manitoba is now estimated at 55 percent complete overall with the central region leading the way at 70 to 80 percent complete, followed by the eastern region at about 70 percent complete, the southwest region at 40 to 50 percent and the northwest region at 35 to 40 percent complete.
Pam de Rocquigny, a cereal crop specialist with Manitoba Agriculture Food and Rural Development, says key factors have been weather and soil conditions.

Clip-Pam de Rocquigny-Manitoba Agriculture, Food and Rural Development:
Typically in any spring usually it's seedbed condition, soil temperatures as well that will kind of dictate when producers are able to get going in the field and start their seeding operations.
Those are two of the biggest factors and I think that's why we've seen kind of in the central region the most seeding progress is because, just with the lower snowfall accumulation we had this past winter and minimal runoff and not too much precipitation over the spring so far there's been good progress made in that central region even though soil temperatures may have been a little on the cooler side.
Where as kind of in the southwest, the northwest regions they had a bit of carry over moisture from last fall so things were taking a little bit longer to dry up in those areas, just not allowing the producers to get out there as fast as producers in the central or the eastern regions.
But. like I said we're over 50 percent complete overall so obviously producers have been able to make good progress and we're definitely way further ahead than we were last year at this time so that good news for sure.

De Rocquigny says cereal crops, including spring wheat, oats and barley, have been going in for the past two weeks and in some regions producers have been done seeding cereals for a week, farmers have been seeding a limited number of peas, canola, grain corn and there's been a little bit of soybeans going in.
She says for crops types like canola and soybeans in particular some producers are holding off due to cooler temperatures and the potential for spring frost.
For Farnmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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