Farmscape for May 15, 2015

Saskatchewan Agriculture reports just over one third of Saskatchewan's 2015 crop has now been planted, considerably higher than the five year average.
Saskatchewan Agriculture's weekly crop report, released yesterday, shows 34 percent of the 2015 crop has been seeded, up from 14 percent last week and considerably higher than the five year average of 9 percent.
Daphne Cruise, a cropping management specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture, says we do have quite a bit of variability with the southwest region at 61 percent, the east central at 16 and the northeast at 13.

Clip-Daphne Cruise-Saskatchewan Agriculture:
With the topsoil moisture conditions the east side of the province in the last five years has really had some excess moisture issues and again last fall went into the winter with quite a bit of excess moisture.
The spring started out not too bad.
We had a fairly decent and slow spring melt but then conditions haven't been overly great because we haven't had a lot of drying conditions either and we're still dealing with some flooded areas.
On the west side it's the complete opposite.
There are areas there that are actually calling for rain, a lot indicating that even some of the pastures are not looking great at this point.
We've got, depending on where we're talking about, there's producers dealing with different issues when it comes to seeding.
I think, when we look across the province, pretty much all producers are hoping for warmer weather.
We started out the first couple of weeks in April with a nice teaser to spring with some warmer temperatures but the last two weeks we've been quite a bit below normal.
This is contributing to cold soils and maybe some slow emergence of crops in some cases.

Cruise says, when it comes to what is being planted, it appears to be the status quo but we might see some more faba beans, particularly in the north where the moisture is a bit excessive and faba beans can handle some of that excess moisture.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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