The fields of eastern Saskatchewan and Manitoba are filled with big, brawny oat crops.
They shouldn’t be.
By this time most years, most of the oats would have been harvested and beginning to arrive at grain elevators and mills. But the cold, wet season has left crops still maturing and oats buyers wondering what they’ll find when producers can deliver.
“We don’t know for sure what we’ll get when the crop starts coming off,” said Terry Tyson of Popowich Milling in Yorkton, Sask.
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“We’re holding out hope that we’ve escaped the worst of the damage.”
Oats are grown across the Prairies, but most milling oats are produced in Manitoba and eastern Saskatchewan. That makes oats one of the crops most affected by the late August frost that fell on eastern Saskatchewan.
Tyson toured farmers’ fields soon after the Aug. 20 frost, and while he doesn’t think the crop there has been devastated, he said there will be discolouration and thin groats.
The frost was sporadic across eastern Saskatchewan, damaging some crops but leaving others free.
Conditions are better in the Red River Valley of southeastern Manitoba.
“Our quality and our quantity are still going to be huge,” said Real Tetrault of Emerson Milling. Much of the crop was seeded in mid-June because of the cool, wet spring.
The cool, damp weather through the summer and into autumn is good oat weather, Tetrault said. Hot weather may speed the crop along, but will produce light groats. Cool, damp weather could produce a big, high quality crop.
But the crop in the Red River area is late. Usually about 75 percent of it would have been harvested by now, but almost nothing has been taken this year.
Tetrault is confident the crop will end up in farmers’ bins in good condition.
“If we got four or five days of sun in a row, you’d see a tremendous difference,” he said.
But the continual weather delays have begun to spook the market, said Tetrault.
Recently Chicago Board of Trade oat futures jerked upward in recognition of weather dangers.
“There’s a bit of a slow panic kicking in,” said Tetrault.
Tyson said the frost in his area will force his company to look farther for milling quality oats than it usually does.
“We’re going to be drawing from an area much larger than normal. We might have areas where we can draw from one guy but not the next,” said Tyson.
Tetrault said his company is filling buyer demands with the last of the old crop that some farmers hung on to, but soon millers and processors are going to run short.
“The quality oats buyers are going to have to coax oats from anywhere and everywhere they can find them,” said Tyson.
“If need be, the price will have to do some of the work.”
