Farmscape for June 22, 2010   (Episode 3355)

The Canadian Wheat Board estimates 10 to 12 million acres could go unseeded across the prairies this year because of the relentless rains received over the last month.

After getting an early start to this year's planting season prairie farmers have been hampered by continuing rains.

Canadian Wheat Board weather and crop analyst Stuart McMillan says most parts of the prairies are reporting a minimum of 200 percent above normal precipitation over the past month.

Clip-Stuart McMillan-Canadian Wheat Board:
I think every crop right now across the prairies will be affected.

It's a question of the degree of impact that will end up occurring.

Right now there is no crops that we see being above average in terms of area from last year excepting perhaps in the end still some lentils and a few other minor pulses will be above average but all of the major grains are going to be lower in area and as well when we look over at production we might see a couple of minor grains again being higher production but all of them will lower in production volumes.

When these rains started to initially build we had thought the impact would be heavily weighted more toward the canola and that we would see oats and barley become the grain of choice for farmers who were pushed into seeding later into say early towards mid-June.

Unfortunately early and mid-June came and many of those farmers never had an opportunity to get out onto their fields and get those crops in.

So we saw the predictions for oats and barley instead of showing them slightly up from past years or at least level to other years we anticipate seeing a seeded acres that is at least 10 to 20 percent below the previous year of the 09-10 cropping year for oats and barley.

McMillan says it's still too early to predict crop quality.

He says if we move into more normal weather patterns though July and August with a hot finish similar to last year we could see some excellent quality in the crops that have been seeded.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council