With this year's winter cereal harvest in Manitoba and most parts of eastern Saskatchewan now complete farmers are reporting yields as high 80 to 90 bushels to the acre and good quality.

Jake Davidson, the executive director of Winter Cereals Canada, says crops came off a little later than expected but, considering the concerns this spring resulting from the extremely dry planting conditions last fall, in good shape.

Jake Davidson-Winter Cereals Canada:

Manitoba crops, as you got closer to Winnipeg were reasonable yielding, up in the 80 to 90 bushels.
Protein might be down a little bit but everybody was generally pretty happy.

I think a lot of people last year, because of the bad start winter wheat got, they were kind of figuring we're in big trouble and in western Manitoba we were in trouble.

We ploughed up a whack of stuff and it became so there was no winter wheat harvest if you lived in Virden or Hamiota or something like that but, in the other parts of the province, even where things came up a little bit thin, winter wheat has pretty good tillering and fills in a lot of the holes and the crop kind of came along pretty well, especially for those people that nursed it along and fertilized it properly and so on.

Some people of course when they don't think they're going to do good they back off on the inputs but those people that treated it as a good crop got a good crop result out of it.

Mr Davidson acknowledges yields were down slightly but they were close to the ten year average with those growers who would typically get 100 bushels to the acre reporting in the 90s.

As far as quality, he says, protein levels are down slightly but fusarium levels were extremely low which is particularly good news for pork producers.