The Canadian Wheat Board is predicting that eight to 12 million acres of farmland in Western Canada will remain unseeded this year because of excess moisture across the region.
At its annual weather and crop briefing, Bruce Burnett, the CWB’s director of weather and market analysis, said the number of unseeded acres is unprecedented.
“I’d like to be more precise (in the estimate) but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me to see unplanted acres of around 10 million,” he told approximately 30 grain industry analysts in Winnipeg.
Of those 10 million acres, Burnett estimated that three million acres of wheat would remain unseeded, 1.7 million acres of barley and the remainder would be non-board crops, like canola.
In most years, there are pockets of land on the Prairies that cannot be seeded, but that usually represents 500,000 acres or less, Burnett said. If CWB projections are correct, 15 to 20 percent of the 60 million acres of cropland across Western Canada will lie dormant this summer.
Most unseeded acres are in Saskatchewan, because 36 percent of the crop is unseeded and prospects for late planting are limited.
Burnett pointed to a map illustrating the amount of rainfall on the Prairies from April 1 to June 8. A large chunk of the map, stretching to Lake Manitoba from the Alberta/Saskatchewan border was coloured purple, indicating record precipitation.
As an example, during that period nearly 200 millimetres of rain fell on Saskatoon, nearly 50 mm more than the previous record for April, May and the early part of June.
With more rain in the forecast over the next 10 days for much of the region, Burnett isn’t holding out much hope that fields will dry up in time for growers to seed more acres.
“In many cases these acres are just lost and will not see any crop.”
