Farmers throughout southeastern Manitoba are busy with spring seeding. Earl Bargen is the provincial Farm Production Extension Specialist in Steinbach. He estimates seeding is about one-third complete in the area stretching from Beausejour, south to the U.S. border.

"We had a solid week of seeding. A lot of wheat has gone in and there is corn in already. In other parts of the southeast, there are even some soybeans in and some sunflowers in, lower acreages. The main ones have been wheat and corn. There isn't a lot of moisture but there is moisture there that they can seed into. I think the guys are just banking on the fact it's going to rain eventually and are just getting the seed in the ground while they can."

Bargen notes he is starting to hear about winter wheat fields being written off by crop insurance and being re-seeded.

"I am hearing some guys are having crop insurance out to look at some of the fields. There has been re-seeding happening already on some fields. But, again, that's field-by-field. The field I was monitoring has been re-seeded. We had a weather station in it last winter and we were monitoring soil temperatures and whatnot, and none of the data showed any red flags. But the stand was such that the producer got crop insurance out and they re-seeded it. That's a management decision."

Meanwhile, Ed Peters of Henervic Farms west of Steinbach says their winter wheat looked okay at first, but now all 950 acres have been written off. He notes they have grown winter wheat for about 25 years and have had crop failures three times, two of them being in 2017 and 2018.