University News for June 19, 2012

A plant science instructor with the University of Manitoba reports crop development this spring remains ahead of normal and yield potentials look excellent.

The 2012 growing season has been characterized by an early spring melt followed by warmer than usual temperatures which allowed farmers to get an earlier than normal start to spring seeding.

Gary Martens, a plant science instructor with the University of Manitoba's Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences, says the crops are uniform, they have adequate moisture and very few areas have suffered from the excess moisture that we've seen in the past.

Clip-Gary Martens-University of Manitoba:
I would say that moisture looks adequate for the time of year that we're at right now.

Crops need a lot of water right at the time they're flowering because that's the time of their peak biomass, they have the most amount of growth going on, they need a lot of water at that time.

Right now, from what I can see, most of our crops have that adequate moisture to set seed and to start filling the seeds.

The winter wheat is headed everywhere.

It's beautiful.

Fall rye is headed.

I'm just starting to see the canola.

I saw a field the other day that was in full flower but it's just starting to come in.

The spring cereals, wheat and oats, they are probably in the flag leaf stage many of them.

They're looking very good, nice and dark green.

Even the warm season crops like corn and soybeans, even though they're still smaller, they're just poised to take off.

Martens anticipates an early harvest this year which will begin with winter wheat in about mid-July.

He notes crops he's seen over past five to ten years have always had drowned-out spots but this year the fields are unusually uniform, yield potentials look excellent and it looks like we'll have as good a crop as we've had in the past number of years.

For UniversityNews.Org, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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