Saskatchewan Crop Insurance officials demonstrated how to do pre-harvest appraisal as part of Crop Diagnostic School this year.

Rheaume Richaud is a Field Supervisor with SCIC and along with Agrologist Fred Waelchli demonstrated how to do a pre-harvest appraisal on hard red spring wheat.

Richard says basically, they use a square yard measurement and count the plants.

"Count the number of heads, and kernels in each head to come up with how many seeds are in a square yard, and from that, we can calculate into bushels per acre."

He notes for peas it's a little harder to count plants standing so you throw down the square yard and then pick all the plants in that area and take the pods off the plants.

"We've got our total number of pods for that square yard. We can come up with an average of peas for each pod, that will give us our peas per square yard.  Again do the calculation multiply by  4,840 to give you an acre and then our seeds per kilogram for peas, and we can calculate a bushel per acre.

"Richard says for pre-harvest appraisal of Canola you have to take the crop development into consideration because it can vary.

He says like the peas you pick plants within the square yard and count the pods.

Waelchli points out on plants that may still be flowering or have been nipped off by deer it will impact the potential yield assessment.

"The further down the road you are into the podding, where the plant is done flowering the more accurate your yield assessment will be. 

Richard says the pre-harvest appraisal is like it was for other crops, noting at Crop Insurance they do have some historical data on how many seeds there are in a kilogram.

He notes the closer you are to harvest the more accurate your appraisal is going to be.

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