Crop researchers in Ontario are hopeful this year's wheat harvest will set new records in the province.
Peter Johnson, an agronomist with Real Agriculture, says farmers are reporting yields up to 148 bushels per acre in Chatham-Kent and Essex County -- where just the right amount of rain has fallen.
"Wow, is it incredible," he says. "We just need Mother Nature to stop the rain right now, because wheat harvest doesn't need the rain."
That's because Johnson says wheat is a dry-land crop, and relies on moisture early on -- which it got.
Now we need about two weeks of full sun to get the wheat out of the field.
"We really worry a lot about dry weather, and the corn and soybean crop were suffering tremendously, just before we got this last bit of rain," says Johnson. "[But wheat] handles drought very well."
He estimates the wheat harvest in Essex County is at least 50% complete, if not two-thirds complete, while the harvest in Chatham-Kent is in the ballpark of about a third complete.
"At the end of the day, we got enough moisture to support really great yields," says Johnson.
