Seeding operations are gearing up across the region as warmer temperatures start to prevail across southern Manitoba.

Warren McCutcheon farms in the Carman area and says, like many areas of southern Manitoba, soil conditions on his fields are dry despite the snow we received a couple of weeks ago.

"The snow helped a little bit but unfortunately it blew off in a lot of spots with the howling winds. A rain event would definitely be very welcome because the snow, while it was nice to get, wasn't a game-changer by any means. It's is definitely dry and something that I haven't dealt with in my career and if you talk to the older generation they compare it to the 1980s when there was no sub-soil moisture and they talk about the droughts. Obviously, we're not there yet and we're hoping to catch some timely rains this spring."

McCutcheon says they were able to plant some crop a few weeks ago prior to the snow that fell, which appears to have been a wise decision.

"We wanted to take advantage of that little bit of moisture in the soil so we put some wheat in early and things have germinated. It's been pretty slow obviously because of the cold temperatures, but I think it was the right decision so far."

Meanwhile, McCutcheon says it's been a rather frustrating marketing year. He says they sold a lot of their crop last summer and fall based on stocks and crop size information from the USDA before commodity prices began to really climb.

"Looking back on it now, a lot of our crop was sold based on poor information. Now for this year, while new crop prices are strong, they're not as good as older crop prices and there are concerns over the dry conditions, so we're very cautious about new crop sales in terms of what we're going to get here. If we see some nice rains this spring to get the crop out of the ground and growing then it would be nice to take advantage of the $15.00 or $16.00 canola and $8.00 or $9.00 wheat, but at this point, we're just hanging tight while we try to get something to grow."