It appears that Southern Manitoba farmers are going to get an early start to spring seeding.
Warren McCutcheon farms near Homewood. He got things going on Monday.
"Probably could have started a couple of days earlier, maybe put a little bit of wheat in the ground. We're just trying to give the soil a little more time to warm up," he said. "It actually worked better than I thought it would. We did about 20 or 30 acres. Kind of got a field opened up, got everything working. (There's) a few things we need to take care of here in the rainy break before we fire up again. But it was kind of nice to have a bit of a soft start there, just make sure it was working good and then, you know, when the weather does turn, the half inch of rain we got (Tuesday) yesterday coupled with sunny days, we could be back out there again."
At this point, he feels there isn't much concern for delays.
While it is a bit early, McCutcheon says any time they can get wheat into the ground in April, in good conditions, is always a bonus.
"Quite often we see our best wheat crops on early seeded years. Just totally depends though. If it sits in the ground for a month, and it gets cold and backwards weather, that's not ideal either. But if we can get it in, and it does stay seasonal or above seasonal like we've seen for the last few weeks, if you get off to a really good start, that's kind of nice and hopefully, warm the ground up a little bit too."
For beans, corn and canola however, McCutcheon says he'll be waiting for soil temperatures to come up further. The sooner than happens, the sooner those crops can go in, which will in turn allow farmers to take advantage of what soil moisture there is.
"We've had not a lot of precipitation, obviously, over the winter, but we did have a little bit of snow or rain and then it melted, and snow and then melt, and a couple little rain events I think did help kind of bolster that soil moisture a little bit. So, we're not in as bad a shape as we maybe saw coming out of such a dry year last year," explained McCutcheon.
"Just kind of looking around the fields a little bit right now, frost is coming out of the lighter land. They've actually gotten a little bit wetter the last few days. The heavier lands are just kind of in a nice moisture right now. We don't want it to be too mucky and wet in the spring. Kind of ideal right now," he added. "It could obviously change fairly quickly, but really no complaints for an early start right now. We're going to be more concerned moving into the growing season, where we don't have that deep down reserve soil moisture we've have some years. We're going to be a lot more reliant on timely rains, and really, having them come more frequently than we've seen for years here, to have a decent crop this summer for sure."