STE. AGATHE, Man. – Farmers in Manitoba’s Red River Valley are getting their crops in fast and hoping for after-planting rains.
That may be a common situation in many farming areas, but valley farmers are surprised by how well seeding is going.
“We live in a flood zone,” said Morris, Man., farmer Lorne Hamblin on a sunny day in the first week of May.
He and his son Doug had just finished seeding a field with oats and other cereals. They were glad to get most of this year’s crop in without struggling with submerged soils and fields that can look like rice paddies in wet years.
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“It’s a good spring,” said Hamblin, who has only soybeans left to sow.
The land is generally so wet here that farmers don’t like to fertilize in the autumn. Hamblin applies anhydrous ammonia as part of one-pass seeding, rather than fertilizing in the fall and facing big leaching losses.
“This has been a good run.”
The Red River Valley has rich, thick, clay soils and receives more heat than most of the Prairies, which allows this land to successfully and consistently produce crops like corn, soybeans and sunflowers.
In much of the rest of the Prairies there is neither the heat nor the frost-free days needed to grow these high value crops.
But valley farmers face a yearly struggle with water, which is absorbed only slowly into the thick clay soils. The valley is a natural drainage basin, with dozens of small rivers snaking through it to dump their contents into the bulging Red River.
In years that the Red River floods, this land can be completely lost to production, as happened to many fields during the flood of the century in 1997.
Many farmyards here are built atop earthen mounds to keep them above any but the highest flood waters. But this year the valley has been about the driest part of the Prairies, missing the wet snow dumps that have fallen across the rest of the West.
The top few centimetres of soil are dry and dusty, but the recent wet years have left considerable subsoil moisture for the germinating crops.
Ste. Agathe farmer Jason Parker, whose tractor and corn seeder were leaving a slight dust cloud behind him, said being able to seed quickly into unsaturated soil was a blessing.
“It’s going very well,” said 19-year-old Parker, whose father was seeding the next field to the east.
“We’re having a good spring so far.”
Once the corn is in they will wait a week or two before seeding their soybeans and canola.
A few kilometres to the south, Ken Robert was hurriedly refilling a truck with oats seed. Little snow cover this winter and few spring showers have left the fields dry, but with enough humidity for good germination.
“As long as we get rain after seeding, we’ll be fine,” said Robert.
“We’re going to need rain once we get done.”
Hamblin said farmers in the valley are always cautious when they pray for rain, fearing they will be answered with too much abundance.
“We always have too much rain. A little bit would be nice, but a whole bunch is too much,” said Hamblin.
