Winnipeg — Excessive moisture in southern Manitoba and Saskatchewan has not only caused flooding and complications for farmers on the ground, but also for aerial spray operators.
“We’re busy here every year at this time, but there is increased demand for the airplanes because the ground sprayers are not able to get on some fields,” said Jon Bagley, owner and pilot at Westman Aerial Spraying, east of Brandon. “So we have picked up extra work, there’s no two ways about it.”
Bagley says right now his business is filled with requests to spray fungicides and herbicides.
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“We probably got the biggest surge in demand right about the time we had that four to five day rain,” said Bagley. “That’s when it was kind of all building and as soon as that ended, a lot of crops were ready for fungicide spraying and a lot of late-seeded crops were ready for herbicide applications.”
Bagley said the intense demand for aerial spraying makes it hard to keep up at times.
“Right now, we’ve got conservatively 20,000 acres on the books that need to be done right away and then we probably have that same amount coming over the next week for sure. So we’re just having trouble keeping up.”
At times, windy conditions have made it difficult to get any significant amount of spraying done, but better weather has slowly improved the situation, he said.
“It is drying up enough that we can start to get some ground spraying done again, which will hopefully take a bit of pressure off the airplanes,” said Bagley.
