A Manitoba tile installer doesn’t believe the province’drainage tile boom will last forever.
Chris Unrau of Precision Land Solutions in Winkler said interest in drainage tiles will dry up faster than the topsoil if Manitoba’s spell of wet weather comes to an end.
“It’s going to be driven by economics and weather. Right now, we’re seeing a boom. Do I think this will continue? I doubt it. If it dries up, we’re going to see the bottom fall out.”
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Contractors have installed 40,000 acres of perforated PVC pipes in Manitoba since the late 1990s. It is a fraction of the one million acres of soybean and corn fields that have been converted to tile drainage in Ontario over the past decade.
“We’re never going to achieve in Manitoba, in my lifetime, what they’ve done in Ontario,” Unrau said.
He said Manitoba would likely remain a niche market compared to Ontario, where drainage tile is installed on 4.3 million acres of cropland.
Ontario producers can grow 250 bushels of corn per acre, he added, which makes the economics of tile drainage more feasible.
Nonetheless, wet soil conditions in much of Manitoba in 2009 and 2010 have generated more interest in drainage tile.
Most of the tiles have gone into potato fields, but Unrau said forecasts that the wet cycle will continue on the Prairies has also increased interest among grain and oilseed producers.
“We’re getting more and more calls from mainstream producers. It used to be that tile was a luxury, for only the special crops.”
Sid Vander Veen, drainage coordinator with Ontario’s agriculture ministry, said tiling can also improve yields in dry soil by removing excess moisture from the soil in spring.
“Because that excess moisture has been drained out of the soil, the crop roots grow deeper and extend wider,” he said.
This makes them more capable of seeking out water if there is a dry period later in the growing season.
