A late start to spring planting followed by above average rainfall during the growing season resulted in slow crop development and a difficult harvest.

Bruce Burnett, a weather and crop specialist with CWB, reports at the end of September the harvest is about 70 per cent complete in western Canada behind average and well behind last year's 90 per cent complete at this time of year.

Bruce Burnett - CWB:

The harvest in September basically had been interrupted by some heavy rains.

It started in the last week in August and into the first week in September.

That plus the fact that some of the crop was not ready yet certainly caused initial harvest delays.
We had very little of the crop, less than 30 percent of the crop harvested by the 15 of September but with some drier weather since the 15 of September we've seen that progress pick up considerably.

The rains again have been the biggest factor.

There were some frosts in the last week in August and certainly in the first week in September in certain regions.

We did see crops affected by that but only the latest crops were hurt in terms of crop quality and for the most part those areas, we did manage to get most areas mature before the first fall frost.

Mr Burnett says the availability of feed grain will be higher this year.

He says we are seeing some weathering problems in both wheat and barley so those crops will see higher amounts of feed available and we are seeing lower protein wheats that will likely be priced into the feed market.