WINNIPEG – Manitoba farmers who don’t trust their memories or coffee shop consensus about the best week to sow their crops can now turn to the worldwide web for answers.
The Manitoba Crop Insurance Corporation and Manitoba Agriculture have posted charts on the internet showing the influence of seeding dates on the average yields of four crops.
Doug Wilcox, a research agronomist for crop insurance, said the new web site has had about 10 “hits” or visits per day at http://www.portage.net/~mpp during its first two weeks.
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Farmers can check how red spring wheat, barley, flax and Argentine canola performed in their own risk areas according to the weeks they were planted. The information is based on crop insurance data collected between 1981 and 1995.
“Most producers know to seed as early as practical is advantageous,” said Wilcox. “I think what is important is, under average conditions, what the yield loss is over time.”
Charts at the internet site show in risk area 1, in the southwestern corner of the province, it’s better to seed Argentine canola during the first two weeks of May than in the last week of April.
Other tables show farmers in that region generally seed almost 44 percent of their canola during the more optimal time frame. Another third of the acres are usually sown during the last week of May.
“In some of the risk areas, you would see that your cereals have a faster rate of decline in time than the broadleaf crops,” he said. “And that being the case, if it’s getting late in the season and you have both crops to seed, you would probably prefer to seed the wheat or the cereal crop first over the broadleaf crop,” he said.
In other risk areas, crops have roughly the same rate of yield decline.
The Management Plus program, sponsored by the Canada-Manitoba Farm Business Management Council, has been turning crop insurance data into usable information for three years, Wilcox said. The internet site is a new way to get the information to farmers.
“We see it as being one of the main delivery methods in the future,” he said. “Certainly the experience in Alberta has been that a large number of producers are able to access the internet, and actually prefer to be able to get the information themselves, as opposed to going to the ag rep’s office and picking it up.”
Those without internet access can obtain the information from provincial ag reps.
