Farmscape for July 10, 2019

A Crop Development Specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture says recent rains have dramatically improved soil moisture conditions and helped crops but the majority of crops still range from poor to good across the province.
As the result of limited early season rainfall crop development across Saskatchewan is highly variable.
Cory Jacob, a Crop Development Specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture, reports crops in some areas of the province are behind their normal staging, we have crops at multiple stages in the same field, which will cause some issues down the road, some crops that are at their normal stages of development and a very small percentage of crops that are ahead.

Clip-Cory Jacob-Saskatchewan Agriculture:
The moisture situation has definitely changed in the province.
We went from lacking of moisture to now, we're good for now.
A few weeks of no moisture then moisture in a couple of weeks to help the crops would be just ideal.
Topsoil moisture on the cropland is rated at four percent surplus, 85 percent adequate and 11 percent short.
The topsoil on the hayland and pastureland is rated as two percent surplus, 76 percent adequate, 21 percent short and one percent very short so we've seen a very good turn around in our crop soil moisture conditions in the province.
We would still be calling crop conditions in the poor to good condition across the province.
That would be the majority of crops.
There are some, a few reports fitting into that excellent in the northwest part of the province and crops have improved with the moisture and the warm weather, definitely hearing reports of that.
We have come a little way from where we had started out in the province.
So we are a little bit better than off than a few weeks ago or even a month ago.

Jacob says across the province we'll need some warm weather to get those crops that are behind growing and a little bit of moisture in the coming weeks to help those crops finish up.
He says we don't need the scorching heat typical of July that, for example, can cause heat blasting on canola and flower abortion resulting in a yield penalty.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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