This September will be vastly different from previous Septembers for Rob Pettinger, who grows canola, wheat and other crops on 2,200 acres of land near Elgin, Man.
This year, Pettinger won’t be spending hours inside a combine cab and he won’t spend sleepless nights worrying about the weather.
He has only 150 acres of crop in the ground.
“It is a little bit different,” said Pettinger, who is also president of the Manitoba Canola Growers Association. “I farm with a brother and do construction. So I spent more time doing construction (this summer) and less time farming.”
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Like many growers in southwestern Manitoba, Pettinger’s land was too wet to seed this spring. A wet 2010, a long winter and a cool, wet spring combined to drench fields across the region.
Approximately 2.9 million acres of cropland went unseeded in Manitoba this spring, shattering the previous record of 1.4 million acres set in 2005.
In most years, Manitoba farmers insure nine million acres of cropland, which means nearly a third of the province’s insured acreage was not seeded in 2011.
Consequently, Manitoba Agricultural Services Corp. (MASC), the provincial crop insurance agency, will pay out a record $160 million for its too-wet-to-seed program, said MASC claims services manager
David Van Deynes.
MASC doesn’t keep statistics based on regions, but a large chunk of the 2.9 million unseeded acres were in southwestern Manitoba, Van Deynes said.
“That’s a fact, that (southwestern Manitoba) was more severely affected. They (had) a lot higher percentage of unseeded (acres), relative to any other area of the province.”
Only 10 percent of the land was seeded south of Elgin, around Melita and Deloraine, Pettinger said. Producers between Souris and the Trans-Canada Highway were even worse off — almost no crop was seeded.
But now that the wet spring is an unpleasant memory, farmers in southwestern Manitoba are looking ahead to 2012, Pettinger said.
“Most people have sort of moved on. It is what it is. We’ll see what happens next year.”
Thanks to scorching weather this summer, most of the unseeded land in southwestern Manitoba dried up relatively quickly, permitting producers to prepare the land for next spring.
A number of growers planted crops for green feed and others summerfallowed land, but Pettinger and his brother opted for chem-fallowing.
“We just look at it and say, ‘well, at the price of glyphosate, we don’t think we can cultivate it for that (cost).’”
Pettinger said yields will likely be average to very poor around Elgin.
In a typical scenario, a canola grower who had 30 to 40 percent of a half section drowned out earlier this summer will probably see yields of five bushels per acre in those areas, while the remainder will likely produce average yields.
Further east, near Killarney, crops look relatively good going into harvest, said Kelly Bell, a crop production adviser with Manitoba Agriculture.
“The stuff seeded earlier is looking pretty good. Average to maybe slightly above average, depending on what the particular producer’s land was like (in the spring),” he said.
