Weekly crop progress

Farm and Ranch April 29, 2009 Weather conditions last week allowed some farmers around the nation to make good progress on spring planting. For example in Washington growers sowed 20 percent of the state's spring wheat and 19 percent of its barley. But spring planting progress was still running behind normal in the Pacific Northwest and across the country. The major hard red spring wheat producing state of North Dakota had planted only one percent of that crop to start this week. Normally a quarter of the state's spring wheat would be in the ground. USDA meterologist Brad Rippey says seeding progress may be stymied again. Rippey: "We are just starting to a little bit of field work progress in the Dakotas and now it looks like perhaps one to two inches of rain coming t his week. That is going to shut things back down for the Red River Valley, the James River Valley, where we have seen very limited progress to this point." Nationally, just 15 percent of spring wheat has been sown compared to the five year average for now of 36 percent. Winter won't let go either. There was some snow around the northwest yesterday and USDA's Rippey says before that rain gets to North Dakota it will be snow in Western and Central Montana. Rippey: "I don't think we will see any adverse impacts. The moisture if anything will be highly favorable for winter grains and summer crops in that region." Nationally the winter wheat crop showed improvement over the past week with the good to excellent rating moving from 43 to 45 percent of the crop and the very poor to poor percentage unchanged. In the northwest Washington's winter wheat showed a slight deterioration from a week ago, Oregon's improved and Idaho's good to excellent percentage was unchanged. I'm Bob Hoff and that's the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on the Northwest Ag Information Network.