RAPID CITY, Man. — Eastern Manitoba has patchy crops with healthy growth beside moisture-stressed areas and drowned patches at low points and along field edges. Weeds are having a good year.
Many of the crops west from the Red River, down south to Winkler and across the western Red River Valley look fantastic.
From the escarpment west along Highway 23 the fields are a mixed bag of conditions, with healthy areas abutting stunted areas within fields, and with many plants in each crop showing signs of moisture stress from earlier in the season. Most crops look a little delayed and slow to develop.
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But the closer a crop observer comes to Brandon from the south the worse things get, with big drowned patches occupying as much of some fields as growing crops, and with a few healthy stands of crop rising above concentric bands of damaged and stunted crop, as in-field elevation makes the difference between life and death, health and sickness for crops seeded before the late June rainpocalypse.
So with Manitoba’s crops being — depending on the region — OK, great, challenged and awful, how does anyone come up with an estimate of the state, quality and yield of the overall eastern prairie crop?
“It’s tough,” said Chris Birk of CWB, who was one of the leaders of the Manitoba leg of the company’s tour of Western Canada’s farming country this week. Other legs strode across the central and western Prairies, beginning from Saskatoon and Calgary and with all three tours intending to arrive in Regina for a wrap-up news conference.
North of Brandon the same mix of conditions applies as south of Brandon, with the after effects of the rain storm evident in patchy crops and drowned and yellowed patches, but there, as across the region the Manitoba CWB tour traveled yesterday, the land itself was dry on the surface and seemingly unsaturated now.
One of the features of the cross-Manitoba tour yesterday was the lack of standing water in fields or mud in any of the fields checked. Days of warm and dry weather have allowed the sheets and pools of water, so evident two weeks ago, trickle away and soak in.
But with the crops so mixed, so patchy, in so many stages of development, farmers have a management challenge to shepherd the crops through safely to harvest.
That’s something Ryan Nevin of Rapid City is working on, already expecting to do a lot of drying and cleaning this fall when the crop comes in.
“It’s a real mixed bag. There’s areas that look pretty good and there’s areas that are under a lot of stress,” said Nevin during a CWB crop tour stop on his farm.
Debating how and when to use fungicide on an already-delayed crop is one of the issues Nevin is grappling with, and across southern Manitoba there were signs of recent fungicide applications having been done in fields.
Winter wheat seems to be a particularly struggling crop in southern Manitoba this year, with some of the crops that survived mass winterkill now suffering from widespread disease infections.
But most central Manitoba spring crops seemed free of much disease.
Weeds are having a good year in eastern Manitoba, west from the escarpment and in southwestern Manitoba, while the crops from the Red River west to the escarpment looked clean.
With weeds as with every other crop condition in Manitoba this year, it seems like a mixed bag out there and the overall state of the crop is hard to assess even for the pros who were out in the field this week.
