Six weeks ago, farmers and industry watchers were expecting winter wheat acres to rebound on the Prairies, as many thought the cereal would be planted into the millions of unseeded acres in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
But that has failed to pan out, said Dale Hicks, a producer and seed grower in Outlook, Sask., because producers in Saskatchewan’s northeast, who were looking at winter wheat as an option, are still looking at unseeded fields.
“We had a lot of orders from northern Saskatchewan cancelled in August because it was too wet,” said Hicks, who sells winter wheat seed across the province.
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“The areas that experienced a lot of flooding, that were hopeful to have winter wheat seeded on it, still didn’t get seeded.”
As a result it’s unlikely that winter wheat acres will return to 2008 levels, when 1.2 million acres were planted on the Prairies. However, Hicks expects the total to improve from last year’s 600,000 acres, based on Statistics Canada data.
“I don’t think it will be substantially more,” said Hicks, a director with Winter Cereals Canada. “Last year was terrible. We saw acres the lowest they’ve been in seven years.”
In addition to the problems in northeastern Saskatchewan, the harvest of spring crop in the southern grain belt has been delayed by poor weather. Consequently, the ideal time to seed winter wheat, the first weeks of September, has come and gone.
“We’re at the end of the ideal threshold,” Hicks said last week.
The story is similar in Manitoba, said Rick Rutherford, a seed grower near Grosse Isle, Man. The ultimate deadline to insure winter wheat in Manitoba is Sept. 20.
“In our area (as of Sept. 17) I would say there’s probably between 35 to 40 percent of what normally goes in the ground, is in the ground,” he said. “People are having trouble harvesting here because of wet conditions. If you can’t run a combine over it, they’re not pulling a seeder over it.”
Pam de Rocquigny, a feed grains specialist with Manitoba Agriculture, said wnter wheat harvested in the region this summer had extremely high levels of fusarium head blight, with many fields coming in with a FHB index of 13 percent or higher.
“That’s had a dampening affect on how many acres would go in,” Rutherford said. “It’s the whole aspect of the high fusarium. It’s left a little bit of a bad taste in producers’ mouths.”
