The province's winter wheat crop is starting to emerge.

Doug Martin farms near East Selkirk and is secretary with the Manitoba Crop Alliance.

"I think they're looking pretty good...Ours here looks really good, it's greening up already. We lost a few spots where water was sitting...Talking to someone who works for Ducks Unlimited yesterday, he said that they felt a lot of the winter wheat came through the winter pretty well, initial reports out there. We've had a mild winter with a little bit of cold and it seemed to have made it through the winter."

Martin talked about the stage of the crop.

"There's just a bit of greening up, maybe some of it has one leaf sticking out of the ground. A lot brown, so you see a little bit of green showing up in between the brown or dead leaves that grew last fall. It's early for everything here."

He notes precipitation is needed in many areas.

"We do need rain early in the spring to get it off to a good start, so that's going to be a big issue with it going forward here in the next while. We are going to need some moisture to get this crop going. There's not a lot of reserves there and a little bit of surface moisture but that will be gone already. We've had so much wind that the moisture is down."

Martin says the fall rye should also be looking good as it is more winter-hardy than wheat.