Big plans for corn plantings

Monday, April 25, 2011

by SUSAN MANN

Ontario farmers say they’re planning to grow lots of corn this year, according to Statistics Canada’s production of principal field crops report released today.

Grain corn acreage should increase by 125,000 acres to 2.5 million acres, it says in the report. That’s an increase of 6.7 per cent compared to last year and is the largest acreage devoted to grain corn since 2007. The record for grain corn acreage in Ontario was set in 2007 when 2.1 million acres were planted.

Meanwhile Prairie farmers anticipate planting a record area of canola and will grow more durum wheat, barley and oats this year compared to last year.

As for Ontario’s winter wheat crop, Peter Johnson, agriculture ministry wheat specialist, says it looks very good now considering how much wet weather there has been in Ontario and how long the snow stayed. There have been almost no damage reports sent in to Agricorp.

For growers who missed the fall deadline to report their winter wheat acreage and are calling in this spring to sign up for production insurance and having their field inspected, Johnson says virtually all of the acres called in and inspected have been accepted. That means the “stand is very good.”

It looks like winter survival and the crop’s general health currently is very good, he adds, noting that since this spring has been cool the crop hasn’t “kicked the way that we would normally anticipate we would want it to.”  In many fields the wheat crop started to kick over the Easter weekend because there were some warmer days but now the province has been plunged back into cold, backward weather.

Localized ponding in some fields isn’t good for the crop either. “All this wet weather is going to have some impact on the yield,” he says. But “on well-drained fields its still looking very good.”

There was a lot of snow mold this year in both traditional snow-belt regions plus in other non snow-belt regions, such as Strathroy and Lucan, compared to an average year. For the most part, the snow mold didn’t kill the plants but it did take the tops off, Johnson says. “Three weeks ago a lot of producers were saying the wheat crop looks bad.”

The plants stayed alive, have generated new leaf grow and are starting to look green in the fields. “It’s looking much better today than it did three weeks ago.”

Lucknow-area farmer Lawrence Hogan says despite the wet weather he was able to get a nitrogen application on his winter wheat the week before last when there were two dry days. He describes his winter wheat crop as average looking.

Hogan, who grows 500 acres of corn, soybeans and winter wheat, says he wasn’t planning on planting more corn this year compared to other years.

Hogan says normally he plants during the first week of May so he’s not behind this year. But last year his planting was done by now. “It was exceptionally warm and dry so we went ahead and started early,” he says. BF