April has just arrived and alarm bells already are sounding throughout the western prairie grainbelt.
It’s dry out there.
Alberta has issued wildfire warnings and the Canadian Wheat Board says germination could be a problem.
Trevor Hadwen, agroclimate specialist at Agriculture Canada’s agri-environment services branch, said areas that were dry last fall didn’t improve much over the winter.
Actual soil moisture is hard to determine at this time of year, but climate and precipitation models show that conditions in north and central Alberta and west-central Saskatchewan have not improved at all, he said. Overall, the Prairies received about 60 percent of normal snowfall this winter.
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Hadwen said some areas have been dry since the fall of 2008 and there is a lot of concern about this year’s crops and pastures.
“For this time of year, it’s pretty significant,” he said of current conditions.
Alberta Agriculture soil moisture specialist Ralph Wright said precipitation this winter was half of normal.
“There are six months of the year where we only get four inches of water so 50 percent of normal means we are short two inches,” he said. “We can make that up in a heartbeat with a few days of wet weather.”
Hadwen said that won’t be enough in some places that experienced a 250 millimetre departure from normal precipitation. A sustained rain or snow will be required to make a difference.
Farmers will be looking at cropping decisions that might include not planting at all, he said. Pastures and forage crops will also require careful management.
Hadwen said he uses the word drought frequently because the conditions meet the meteorological definition of a drought.
“In terms of agricultural drought, it’s probably not there yet,” he said March 29.
Yet some of the statistics show conditions drier than in the government’s database, he said.
In Saskatchewan, southern regions saw above or well above normal runoff, thanks to a January snowstorm, but runoff in the northern grain growing areas was below normal.
How that will translate into soil moisture for spring planting has yet to be seen. The soil has not completely thawed and the province won’t issue its first soil moisture map until May 3.
Hadwen said runoff can make a difference but it depends on the soil underneath. Wet soil that froze last fall contains a lot of ice and won’t absorb the runoff. In some cases, the soil gets saturated so quickly the runoff flows elsewhere.
In the north, streams, dugouts and sloughs that rely on snowmelt to fill likely won’t this year. Southern Alberta is in better shape than the rest of the province but is still not that good.
Wright said this level of dryness has only been seen four times in Alberta since 1961.
With files from Barbara Duckworth.
