The weather is starting to warm up after being around ten below the seasonal average.
Those colder temperatures in the province have left some farmers anxious about a possible delayed start to seeding.
Neil Townsend, a chief market analyst with Farm Link, said though some farmers are anxious, the markets aren’t.
“Right now, it’s early enough; even if it doesn’t feel like that, there is time to get whatever people intend to plant into the ground,” he said. “If we were talking May 20, and there was some planting, but we were still lagging far behind, and we hadn’t had too many British thermal units yet, the market would be very concerned.”
“The market is going to be highly sensitive to weather disruption, and it doesn’t need to be a major weather disruption. It just needs to be something that knocks a few bushels per acres of the national yield.”
He said that the markets are more worried about the continued dry weather in the western parts of prairies in Canada and that a more significant concern is that the nighttime temperatures are still very cold.
“You want to see those (temperature) get a little bit better, which enhances the ability of the ground to absorb the moisture. You are not going into the frozen ground, we need general warming up, and that doesn’t seem to be the case.”
