SASKATOON – Wild rice growers have enjoyed one of their best harvests ever.
An unseasonably warm September allowed producers to carry on harvesting longer than usual and every additional day on the lakes meant a bigger crop.
“We’d have been frosted by now in an average year,” Doug Horner, an extension agrologist with the Saskatchewan Indian Agriculture Program in La Ronge.
Usually a substantial amount of harvestable crop is left in area lakes when the weather brings things to a halt, Horner said, but that won’t be the case in 1994: “It looks like we’re going to pick everything that’s there, if it doesn’t blow off.”
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As of Sept. 23, about 907,000 kilograms (two million lbs.) of raw rice had been harvested in the province, slightly ahead of last year’s 860,000 kg (1.9 million lb). As long as the weather holds, said Horner, that total will grow.
In Manitoba, near-perfect growing and harvesting conditions provided a welcome turnaround from last year. While average production is about 450,000 kg (one million lbs.), cool, wet weather and an early frost virtually wiped out the 1993 crop, slashing production to just 36,000 kg (80,000 lbs.).
This year, the harvest should exceed 680,000 kg (1.5 million lbs.) and could reach 771,000 kg (1.7 million lbs.), said Mike Thorvaldson, a wild rice specialist with Manitoba Agriculture in Selkirk.
“This year there’s lots of guys that are out there smiling pretty good,” he said. “They weren’t last year.”
One of those guys is Harry Arseniuk, a rice buyer and processor at Lac du Bonnet, about 100 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg, who described last year as simply terrible.
“There was next to none around here,” he said, adding that this year conditions have been ideal and the crop looks great. Good lakes are yielding an excellent 135 to 180 kg (300 to 400 lbs.) per acre of raw green rice.
With the bigger crop, prices are lower this year. Manitoba’s 260 licensed producers can sell their crop for about $1.60 per kg (70 to 75 cents per lb.), down from around $1.75 a kg (80 cents per lb.) last year. However not many were in a position to benefit from that higher price.
“Last year it was a little more, but there wasn’t any to buy so the price didn’t matter,” said Arseniuk.
Prices in Saskatchewan are similar to those in Manitoba, said Horner, which is enough to provide a decent profit for the roughly 160 active harvesters in the province. Once a producer has spent about $10,000 for an air-boat, there are virtually no production costs besides a lease payment to the provincial government.
In Alberta, production is expected to surpass 450,000 kg (100,000 lbs.) for the first time, said Harvey Yoder, district agriculturalist at Lac la Biche. Last year’s harvest was around 36,000 kg (80,000 lbs.).
Yoder said growing conditions were generally good, although low water levels caused some harvesting problems for the province’s seven or eight commercial producers.
