(Resource News International) –– The late harvest of soybeans and wet conditions preventing machinery from getting on fields is expected to reduce the area that will be seeded to winter wheat in Ontario.
“If there had been a perfect fall, the area seeded to winter wheat in Ontario during the fall of 2009 would have been in the 900,000- to one million-acre range,” said Peter Johnson, a cereals specialist for the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs at Stratford.
“However, based on conditions about a month ago I think the province would have been lucky to see a maximum of 850,000 acres planted.”
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Johnson said that with the harvest of the soybean crop being slowed by cool and wet conditions, winter wheat area in Ontario will now be lucky to hit the 650,000- to 700,000-acre level.
“I think 700,000 acres would be optimistic,” Johnson said.
Producers in Ontario seeded roughly 950,000 acres to winter wheat in the fall of 2008, Johnson said. Of that, 11 per cent suffered winterkill, leaving an estimated 825,000 acres that made it through to the harvest.
In the fall of 2007, Ontario’s producers seeded a record 1.25 million acres to winter wheat.
Producers in the province who are still considering planting winter wheat are also having to deal with crop insurance deadlines.
For most of the main growing areas of Ontario, the crop insurance deadline is Oct. 31, Johnson said. However, as one moves northward in the province, the deadlines for full winterkill coverage are moved up. In some northern areas, he said, the crop insurance deadline is Oct. 15, while even further north the deadline was Oct. 10.
At 650,000 acres, he said, there would be enough production to meet domestic requirements in the province.
“We need about 800,000 tonnes of production to meet domestic needs, which means that about 400,000 acres need to survive,” Johnson said.
Winter wheat production in Ontario this year was pegged at roughly 61.875 million bushels, which would compare with the previous year’s harvest of 101.875 million bushels.
