After a year in which they lost half of their crop, many Manitoba bean growers entered the 2005 season thinking things couldn’t get any worse.
They were wrong.
Unprecedented June rains in many parts of southern Manitoba drowned hopes of a recovery.
“I would suspect that there would be 20-30 percent of an average crop,” said Lincoln Wolfe, president of the Manitoba Pulse Growers Association.
That would be considered a bumper harvest in his neck of the woods near MacGregor, Man., where there were no beans to speak of.
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“Our farm got completely wiped out. We had 2,700 acres of edible beans of which every acre was destroyed.”
Last year farmers were collectively able to muster half of a normal crop. This time there are large areas of the province where the combines didn’t get rolling at all.
“It’s a disaster,” said Wolfe.
Don Sissons, a farmer from Portage la Prairie, Man., considers himself one of the fortunate ones.
As of Sept. 20 he was about three-quarters done his bean harvest. Although he expects below normal yields on all his black, pinto, navy, light red kidney and small red kidney beans, at least there is something out there worth combining – the quality is the best he has seen in years.
He considers himself blessed.
“There are a lot of farms that are going to be filing a crop insurance claim on all the different bean types grown on their farm,” said Sissons.
“I would consider it worse than last year’s situation.”
The early season deluge stressed the crops, leading to robust weed competition and plenty of immature green beans, complicating an already frustrating harvest.
Sissons had to desiccate his crop because his beans weren’t drying down properly, which has increased his costs. Harvest has been a challenge with yields varying dramatically from one piece of land to the next.
“It’s a dog’s breakfast out there,” he said.
In Ontario, it’s more like the cat’s meow.
The production that has been lost in the West will be made up in the East, said John Thompson, procurement manager for Thompsons Ltd., a bean company in Blenheim, Ont.
“We’re in pretty good shape,” he said.
With about 60 percent of the harvest complete, the Ontario crop is yielding 20-plus bags per acre, an improvement over the long-term average of 17 bags. And that’s on 100,000 acres of beans, which is on the high side of what is normally seeded in that province.
That compares to what Thompson estimates will be eight to 10 bags per acre in Manitoba, down from an average of 16 bags, an outlook that is more optimistic than those expressed by Wolfe and Sissons.
Yields are also impressive in Michigan, Minnesota and North Dakota.
“It looks like there’s going to be enough beans to meet the demand,” said Thompson.
He wasn’t caught off guard by Manitoba’s second wreck in as many years because he always figured the risk of a production problem for Manitoba’s dry bean crop is twice that of Ontario’s, which is approximately one disaster every 10 years.
Sissons said the risk expands outside the strip of loamy, well-drained soil that extends south of Lake Manitoba running from Portage la Prairie through Altona, a region that consistently outperforms other bean growing areas of the province.
“I think the true bean growing areas and the true bean growing land is once again showing its worth,” he said.
