Saskatchewan, big whitetail country!!! | AS soon as the land can be driven on without getting stuck in the fields after the spring melt. We have precious little other choice to seed up here on the verge of agriculture. This is sometimes the beginning of May, but is often the middle, or even the end of May. Sometimes, the soil needs to thaw out if it has been a particularly cold night, so that the drill doesn't gouge out giant frozen earth chunks. This is northeast Saskatchewan, one of the areas in the true fringe of agriculture, mind you, where to the north is nothing but forests, moose, rock,and muskeg, until you hit the tundra We can not wait for soil temperature to be optimal. Soil moisture has never been an issue. I can't remember having dry soil to seed into. That wheat must go in the soil if we can have a hope of it maturing by mid-September, when the weather usually gets wetter again. Wheat can be a risky crop in cool years where our growing season length is borderline for maturity. I would say 4 in ten years it won't make the top two grades in my specific region, due to fall frosts, wet harvest conditions, and high moisture in the growing season, leading to low, sometimes single digit protein content. Where I come from, we crave a hot, dry year. That is about right for our region. Unfortunately, this means a drought for the rest of the province is key to us getting a bumper, high quality crop. The dryer the weather, the better we perform. We are a wet region, an anomoly, in an otherwise dry land... |
Spring Wheat
