Farmscape for July 14, 2014

A weather and crop specialist with CWB estimates four million acres of crop production have been lost this year on the prairies as a result of land not being seeded or from crops being abandoned due to excess moisture and flooding.
The eastern prairies, particularly western Manitoba and eastern Saskatchewan, have seen extremely wet conditions this spring and summer.
Bruce Burnett, a weather and crop specialist with CWB, says wet weather hampered planting and then heavy precipitation in late June and early July caused flooding that washed out some crops and will reduce the yield and quality of those crops that did survive.

Clip-Bruce Burnett-CWB:
Our current estimate is for around four million acres between the two provinces will be lost due to either not being seeded or abandoned because of the crops had been flooded out.
Certainly that's going to be a major impact on the two provinces both in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
Again the area impacted is mostly in western Manitoba and eastern Saskatchewan although there are some parts of the northern growing areas in north central Saskatchewan that also received some very heavy rains as well that's impacted production but it's certainly going to be a large impact on our crop production this year.
We've gone from what people were expecting to be an above average crop because of the good starting moisture now to a crop that's more likely going to be below average in terms of our total production on the prairies.

Burnett notes crop development is running approximately two weeks behind normal on the eastern prairies and a week to ten days behind normal in the western areas but we have a reasonably good forecast in terms of temperatures in the upcoming two weeks and that will help boost crop development.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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