The area planted to winter wheat in Ontario was down from the previous season, with the extremely wet fall associated with the reduction in seeded area, according to an official with the Ontario government.
"Planting of Ontario’s winter wheat crop got off to a poor start with heavy precipitation, especially in the clay soils in the southern regions of the province, preventing producers from seeding as much winter wheat as they would have liked," said Peter Johnson, a cereals specialist for the Ontario agriculture ministry in Guelph.
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He pegged winter wheat area in the fall of 2011 in Ontario at 700,000 acres, which compared with the one million acres seeded in the fall of 2010. In 2007, a record 1.25 million acres of winter wheat was sown in Ontario.
Of the acres that were seeded in 2011, 79 per cent of the acres sown consisted of soft red winter wheat, 14 per cent were hard red winter and the remaining seven per cent consisted of soft white winter wheat, Johnson said.
The delayed harvest of the soybean and corn crops in the province, along with wet conditions during the latter stages of October, really hurt planting decisions, he said.
Johnson noted that roughly 630,000 of the 700,000 acres were seeded before the Oct. 31 crop insurance deadlines in the province. Dry and warmer weather during the first couple of weeks in November allowed producers to plant some winter wheat without insurance.
Of the winter wheat crop that was planted in 2010 trend line yields were in the 75.6 bushel per acre range, he said. For the crop that was planted in the fall of 2011, the base line trend yield has been projected at 81.3 bushels per acre.
Wet conditions prevented the winter wheat crop from maturing as far as it would normally before winter freeze-up, he said. "A nice layer of snow cover would also be beneficial for the crop, but so far has failed to occur."
He also pointed out that there is a lot of growing time between now and the summer harvest.
Johnson said that 800,000 tonnes of production is required to meet domestic needs.
