Hundreds of Manitoba farmers have been annoyed, aggravated and exasperated this spring by fields too wet for seeding. Yet, Andy Barclay, who farms north of Souris, Man., was dealing with an additional water crisis last week. The basement of his home in Souris was flooded after a 75 millimetre rain drenched the community.
Barclay pumped the water out and salvaged a couple of rooms in his basement, but two months of flooded fields and extremely high flows in the Souris River have emotionally exhausted Barclay and others who live in southwestern Manitoba.
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“It’s day after day. It’s not just the farm, it’s your basement … and the sirens going off in town because they need sandbaggers again,” he said. “It just gets tiring. That’s all anyone talks about day after day is the flood and the rain.”
All of the 2,400 acres on Barclay’s farm will go unseeded this year because his fields are saturated.
“Basically, you couldn’t put an implement on (any of ) it…. Probably two-thirds of it is water with little islands of land.”
It’s not much consolation but dozens of farmers around the community are dealing with similar conditions this spring, said Lionel Kaskiw, Manitoba Agriculture crop production adviser in Souris.
“From talking to the older producers in the area, nobody’s seen this (before)…. One producer said his father settled here in 1927 and they’ve never, ever had it this wet.”
Only 10 to 20 percent of the cropland around Souris was seeded by the middle of June and crops in the ground were turning yellow due to excess moisture. In other parts of southwestern Manitoba, the conditions are less severe but dozens of producers will plant a fraction of their normal acres in 2011.
From Melita to Killarney and north toward Riding Mountain National Park, 30 to 50 percent of the land won’t be planted this spring, which represents a large chunk of the 2.5 million acres that will go unseeded in Manitoba, based on Canadian Wheat Board estimates.
There are a number of factors behind the extremely wet conditions in southwest Manitoba, Kaskiw said, including a wet year in 2010, more snow cover than usual, a wet, cool spring and a massive amount of water that flowed into the region from North Dakota and Saskatchewan.
A number of farmers have attempted to aerial seed this spring but Kaskiw isn’t convinced that planting a crop with an airplane makes sense, given the conditions in southwestern Manitoba this year.
“Truthfully, the viability of flying canola on with an airplane and dumping it on wet ground, if you can’t get out there and harrow it in… the viability of that seed is limited,” he said.
“You’re going to have root rot issues, you’re going to have canola that is stressed…. So the economics, when I look at it, they’re really not there for the expense you have just to get the seed on the ground.”
