The Prairies will probably have 6.5 million acres unseeded this summer, the Canadian Wheat Board said in its end-of-seeding-season outlook session.
But lurking under many of the more than 50 million acres that farmers managed to seed across the Prairies already is the grave danger of frost or crop degradation due to late and slow development.
Current models suggest the crops on much of Western Canada’s acreage will hit maturity by the last week of August and the first week of September, and will then need another week to 10 days to dry down.
That brings up the spectre of frost, which would add grave injury to the insult seeding problems have faced farmers with this spring.
“Right now, (late development) is not as alarming as it will be in late July if we don’t receive above normal temperatures and get a boost to crop development,” CWB weather and crop conditions analyst Bruce Burnett said in an interview after his presentation earlier today.
Normal weather conditions, which are better than the cool spring the Prairies have been coping with, would leave crops vulnerable to fall frost.
Burnett presented a picture of a stressed prairie crop and bad conditions for farmers, who are struggling with saturated and often unworkable soils in the southern grain belt, too-dry conditions across much of the Peace River region and the northern grain belt and disastrous flooding conditions in large parts of southwestern and central Manitoba and southeastern Saskatchewan.
The board estimates that only 20.35 million acres will be sown to wheat, which is more than three million acres less than farmers told Statistics Canada in March they intended to plant. That would be two percent below last year.
Durum acreage will be 20 percent less than farmers hoped to plant this year, at four million acres. That will be a 27.3 percent increase over last year, however.
Barley acres will be about 700,000 fewer than farmers hoped for, but almost four percent higher that last year’s 6.42 million.
Burnett said barley acreage also has the biggest potential to rise as farmers switch to the hardy crop if other crops can’t be seeded soon.
The board is now estimating that most likely average yields across the Prairies will be 38.1 bushels per acre for spring wheat, 35.5 bu. per acre for durum and 58.4 bu. per acre for barley.
In most years only about 500,000 acres across the Prairies’ 63 to 65 million acre base can’t be planted due to bad conditions. Presently the board thinks the final prevented planting number will be six to eight million acres, depending on the weather over the next two weeks, with 6.5 million now most likely.
Wet weather is forecast for much of the Prairies over the next few days, so the low end of that estimate looks doubtful. Bad weather will quickly drive the number to the high end.
“You could easily add another million acres to our (current) estimate of 6.5 (million acres) if we were to have very adverse conditions,” said Burnett.
While this year’s seeding problems are similar in size to last year’s, Burnett said most farmers have been lucky to not experience each, since the saturation zones in the two years have been generally divorced from each other. However, a minority of the area has had problems two years in a row and those farmers will be in the worst situation.
