Wheat harvest delayed

Thursday, July 17, 2008

by SUSAN MANN

“We have great weather for starting down in Essex so we’re off to a great start,” says Larry Shapton, general manager of the Ontario Wheat Producers’ Marketing Board.

The crop is essentially average, says OMAFRA cereals specialist Peter Johnson. But “it’s not outstanding the way we had hoped.”

The yield range to date on fields in Essex and stretching to London where harvesting has already started too is 50 bushels per acre on a few poorer fields to 105 bushels per acre with most fields at the 70 to 90 bushels per acre range.

It’s too early to tell what the crop size will be, says Shapton, noting they won’t know until the combining is done in August. There’s close to 1.3 million acres of winter wheat in the ground and about 200,000 acres of spring wheat.

This year from heading to harvest is taking seven weeks whereas usually it takes six weeks. “That just shows the fact that we haven’t had that week of extremely hot temperatures,” Johnson says, adding generally there’s one week or at least five days sometime between June 1 and July 15 where the temperatures soar above 30 degrees Celsius. “That really burns the wheat crop in. This year we didn’t have that and it’s a slower process.”

As for armyworm, it’s knocking down yields in severely impacted fields where controls either didn’t happen or didn’t happen in time. Yields in those fields are in the range of 65 to 75 bushels per acre.

“A couple of fields that were really hammered were down to as low as 50 bushels (per acre),” Johnson says, adding this is the worst year for armyworm damage he’s ever seen in his 23-year career.

Typically there are one or two hot spots in Ontario for armyworm. This year there was “quite significant pressure” on the entire north shore of Lake Erie and there was a hot spot in the Exeter, Hensall, and Seaforth area along with other minor hot spots.

The industry continues to be aware and alert for fusarium. “We’re seeing low amounts of fusarium in almost every sample that comes in,” Johnson notes, but “not at concerning levels.” So far only a couple loads have been downgraded to feed because of fusarium.

Farmers need to do everything they can to get the wheat crop out of the field so it doesn’t get any worse, he says. It’s important for farmers to not leave it in the fields any longer than they have to because any time the wheat is more than 18 per cent moisture the fusarium will spread.

Along with fusarium, sprouting and mildew are showing up in this year’s wheat crop at very low levels. “In both cases the answer is harvest as quickly as you can,” Johnson says. For most farmers now, sprouting and mildew are not at levels that would cause concern.

Shapton estimates that many farmers forward contracted a higher percentage of their crop this year compared to other years because of the higher prices. “When they get it off and know what they have, they’ll probably sell the rest of it at that time because prices are still relatively strong.” BF