It’s estimated that western Canadian farmers still had close to one-third of their acres in the field as of Sept. 30
There’s some good, some bad and some ugly in this year’s western Canadian cereal crop.
Harvest is not over yet, but it looks like the crop will be all over the map, comprising a wide range of grades and quality factors.
Daryl Beswitherick, manager of quality assurance standards with the Canadian Grain Commission, said the commission’s harvest sample program has now received 5,000 submissions, which is half of the 10,000 that are normally expected.
The good news is that the vast majority of early red spring wheat submissions fell within the top two grades.
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The bad news is that later samples are showing a marked reduction in quality, with mildew and sprouting becoming more common as the harvest season drags on.
“We are beginning to see a decline in quality,” Beswitherick said. “We’re still looking at 80, almost 90 percent of the (samples) grading in the top two grades, but we really anticipate those numbers starting to go down.
It’s estimated that western Canadian grain farmers still had close to one-third of their total acres in the field as of Sept. 30.
Of those acres, much of the wheat will likely be downgraded to No. 3 or feed, depending on the extent of sprouting and mildew, Beswitherick said.
“Mildew is becoming more prominent with the wetter weather that we’ve had in September,” he said.
“We’re starting to see more threes and feed … and we’re also starting to see more samples … that have some green kernels and some fully mature kernels, where there was kind of two crops within a crop.”
The grain commission is beginning to prepare composite samples, which will be used to assess the end-use functionality of the milling wheat harvest, he added.
It should have a good handle on the overall quality of this year’s harvest by the end of October.
Average protein levels of the CWRS samples submitted was around 14.1 percent as of last week.
Kent Erickson, a grower from Irma, Alta., said harvest has been a challenge for most producers in his area.
Some growers didn’t harvest a bushel of dry grain in September, he said.
“If you’re looking at central and northeastern Alberta, you’re probably looking at anywhere from 75 percent left in the field down to around 40 percent or so,” Erickson said Oct. 1.
“In our area, we’re probably closer to 50 or 60 percent done, but quality is all over the map.”
In many areas, producers struggled with harvest management decisions, unsure whether they should swath, desiccate or wait for fields to mature naturally.
“Anything that was swathed in our country on the cereals side is just terrible,” Erickson said.
“Guys with swathers tended to swath their crops this year, but (in terms of quality) it looks like that was the wrong thing to do.”
Mitchell Japp, provincial cereals grains specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture, said management of uneven crops has presented a unique challenge this year.
Many growers who were forced to choose between swathing and desiccating also struggled with timing their chemical applications properly.
“Any of the products (that are used) for pre-harvest management in wheat are (designed) for the end of hard dough stage, and anything that’s still green isn’t at hard dough stage yet,” Japp said.
“(Those products) will dry it up, but it’s not the way to do it because it can create a marketing problem and not one that we want to see.”
Premature fall applications of a product such as glyphosate on standing cereals can result in the accumulation of chemical residues in immature kernels.
Glyphosate and desiccants should not be applied before the hard dough stage, when kernels have reached physiological maturity and moisture content in normally below 30 percent.
“At physiological maturity, that herbicide won’t move into the seed any more, but prior to that it will, so it’s really important to follow (label recommendations),” Japp said.
Swathing may have been the most responsible pre-harvest management decision for producers whose crops had a significant percentage of immature plants, but not the most financially rewarding.
“Because of that unevenness, it was really a year for the swather, rather than the sprayer,” Japp said.
“It was and it wasn’t because if you have anything laying down in the swath, we’ve had a few rains now and (the swaths) won’t dry out as quick.”
brian.cross@producer.com
