After much speculation, guesswork and prognostications, it appears that Manitoba farmers seeded more than one million acres of soybeans this year.
Manitoba Agricultural Services Corp., the provincial crop insurer, is projecting 1.08 million acres of soybeans for the province in 2013.
With 97 percent of the data reported as of late July, there were 1.048 million acres of insured soybeans in the province, said Doug Wilcox, MASC manager of program development for insurance.
“If you add three percent to that, it becomes one million and 80 thousand,” he said.
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The MASC figures are almost identical to Statistics Canada projections from June, which estimated Manitoba soybeans 1.085 million acres.
“They were almost dead on,” Wilcox said.
At 1.08 million acres, there are now more soybeans than all of the oats, barley and flax grown in Manitoba. The bean acreage is another record for Manitoba and a 28 percent increase from 2012, when growers insured 845,000 acres.
About a month ago most industry watchers were expecting 900,000 to 950,000 soybean acres in Manitoba, so the 1.08 million figure is surprising.
“In certain areas, seeding intentions were reduced because the crop insurance deadline came and it was (still) wet… such as the southwest corner,” said Roxanne Lewko, Manitoba Pulse Growers executive director.
“We must of made up for those acres in other areas, where maybe the seeding intentions were increased in the last minute.”
For more than a year, producers and industry reps have chatted about the possibility of one million bean acres. Lewko said exceeding that threshold is symbolic but also leads to a few questions.
“Is that where we’re going to be, at a minimum, from now on? Are we going to see a million acres each year? Is that our new baseline?”
Besides soybeans, grain corn also set a new Manitoba record this year.
Growers insured 332,000 acres of grain corn this spring, based on 97 percent of the MASC data. That represents a substantial increase from 2012, when producers seeded around 270,000 acres of grain corn.
