On the Prairies, the phrase “next year country” generally reflects the need for more rain.
But with the exception of farmers in Alberta’s Peace region, few will be wishing for moisture heading into the 2011 growing season.
An estimated 10 million acres, mostly in Saskatchewan, went unseeded last year due to excess moisture. Some say the situation could be worse this year.
Soils were saturated heading into winter, and water bodies were full. New moisture will have no place to go.
Read Also
Government, industry seek canola tariff resolution
Governments and industry continue to discuss how best to deal with Chinese tariffs on Canadian agricultural products, particularly canola.
“I don’t want to be an alarmist, but we lost a significant area last year because of wet planting conditions and certainly with the snowfall that we’ve had to date and the fact that we’re in a La Nina situation right now … we’re concerned,” said Bruce Burnett, the Canadian Wheat Board’s director of weather and market analysis.
This is a marked difference from the springs of 2009 and 2010 when droughts were a distinct possibility.
Farmers are already worrying about how they will get on their land this spring. Burnett said it’s hard to say how much will go unseeded in 2011, but two to five million acres seem a reasonable guess.
John Fahlman, acting director of basin operations with the Saskatchewan Watershed Authority, said three factors will affect the situation: moisture levels in the soil at freeze-up, accumulated snow pack and how the snow pack melts.
“The first part of that is in place for a high runoff,” he said Dec. 22. “Fall soils at freeze-up were quite wet almost everywhere, except maybe in the southwest it might not be as bad.”
High water levels and flow through waterways continued into the fall and virtually all sloughs were full. Fahlman said there isn’t much capacity to handle new water.
It’s too early to say how snow pack will affect the situation. A late melt could spell more trouble.
The La Nina effect generally means more snow, and Burnett agreed producers don’t really need any, except enough to cover winter wheat.
Long-term forecasts aren’t particularly accurate, but Environment Canada is predicting above normal precipitation through to February.
Fahlman said the ideal scenario would be dry warm weather in April and May, but even that might not be enough to get farmers on the land.
“From a strictly weather probability sense, we’re going to be behind the eight ball in planting some of our crops.”
Burnett said the markets are already on edge as they wait to see what happens.
“One of the things the markets probably aren’t accounting for yet is that we could see a significant shift in area from one crop to another just based on whether we get some rains at the wrong time in May or something like that,” he said.
Other factors include tight stocks and weather challenges in other grain growing parts of the world.
“Any threats are going to be transmitted to the market, whereas if you had larger stocks (and) the traders were more comfortable, then you would see maybe not the same immediacy in the price responses,” Burnett said.
The excess moisture also presents other problems.
Some farmers have expressed concern about snowmobilers who might drive on fields that usually are fine but this year have sloughs with thin ice.
Fahlman said there is also a lot of moving water in places where the ice is normally safe.
Those who place ice-fishing shacks on these lakes should be sure the ice is stable enough to hold them.
The watershed authority has released water from a number of lakes and reservoirs, but even that isn’t necessarily going to help. Fahlman said the available storage is dwarfed by normal runoff.
“There’s the impression out there that we can control it completely and we can’t,” he said.
The watershed authority forecasts will begin in February and continue as the spring thaw occurs.
