Grain and oilseed farmer Kyle Foster is throwing in the towel on what has turned out to be another disastrous crop year at Arborg, Man.
After struggling to bring in a poor yielding, low-grade crop, Foster and his father, Ken, have decided enough is enough.
The fields are too wet, the yields are too low and the cost of taking off a few hundred bushels of low-quality grain is too high.
“We’ve given up on harvest,” said Kyle, who combined about half of the 4,500 acres he seeded this spring.
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“There’s no crop out there worth taking off and the fields are like small lakes anyway so there’s no point wrecking equipment to get a few more acres.”
Like many farmers across the Prairies, the Fosters entered the year on an optimistic note.
After consecutive years of flooding in 2008 and 2009, conditions in Manitoba’s Interlake region appeared to be ideal for seeding in the spring of 2010.
The Fosters got an early start and had 4,500 of their intended 4,800 acres planted before recurring rain dampened their spirits.
Kyle is now turning his efforts to tilling, spraying and burning unharvested fields in hopes that they will dry out in time for planting next year.
“Out of all those acres, we can’t get a cultivator on anything right now so we’re just sitting back and hoping it dries up. There’s not much else we can do.”
Farmers across Western Canada are facing a similar situation.
After a promising start, excess rain has saturated fields in many areas, leaving millions of acres of farmland filled with ruts, water and weeds.
Earlier this year, the Canadian Wheat Board estimated that between 8.25 and 12.5 million acres would go unseeded.
In early July, Viterra estimated seeded acreage in Western Canada at 50 to 52 million acres, about eight to 10 million acres below the five-year average.
Producers and crop analysts say a significant portion of acres seeded this year will produce little or no crop.
In east-central Saskatchewan, where seeded acreage was already well below normal, many crops have been written off.
Garth Burns, a grain and oilseed producer from Drake, Sask., said it’s hard to assess the extent of this year’s damage.
In his area, about 90 minutes southeast of Saskatoon, farmers are still pushing ahead and hoping for a long, open fall.
But regardless of what the weather brings, much of this year’s crop will never reach the bin.
“Out of the 4,000 acres that we seeded this year, there’s probably 1,000 or more that are flooded out,” said Burns.
“They’ve (farmers) decided they’re better off to just leave it there … and at least they can recapture some of their losses through (crop insurance).”
Craig Thomson, vice-president of crop insurance at Manitoba Agricultural Services Corporation, said Manitoba’s unharvested acres will be significant.
Thomson said the province’s seeded acreage was roughly 600,000 acres below normal this spring.
Since then, flooding and excess moisture have rendered many more fields inaccessible or unharvestable.
MASC received about 3,100 requests this year to appraise drowned out acres but insurance adjusters were unable to get an accurate read on the damage because they couldn’t get into flooded fields.
“We really don’t have a measurement of the number of acres of crop drowned out. It’s significant, but we really don’t have a good total for that,” Thomson said.
“It just depends on who got those heavy rains and what type of drainage they have.”
Bruce Burnett, market analyst with the Canadian Wheat Board, agreed that unharvested acres will be hard to determine until snow puts an end to this year’s harvest operations.
However, the number of abandoned acres will be considerably higher than normal, he said.
“It’s still premature to do the assessments on this stuff, mostly because … if the weather closes in on us, we could still leave some of the (harvest-able) crop out there,” Burnett said.
The wheat board is anticipating a significantly downgraded wheat crop with limited volumes of milling wheat falling into the top two grades, he said.
Both Burnett and Foster added that an early freeze up and heavy snowfall this winter could have a severe impact on next year’s seeded acreage.
Foster said farmers will be scrambling this fall to till as many acres as possible and remove as much plant residue as they can.
Producers who managed to keep their summerfallow black and work their harvested fields after combining will have a leg up come seeding time.
Fields that are tilled and free of trash will collect less snow in the winter and more heat in the spring.
“The way it looks now, if that field hasn’t been worked this fall, it’s not going to get seeded next year either,” Foster said.
Spraying unharvested and weed-infested fields and setting them ablaze is another popular strategy but in many areas, fields are too wet to burn.
“So far, we’ve only been able to burn one quarter,” said Foster.
At Drake, Sask., Burns offered a similar assessment, saying many farmers will be lucky to get this year’s summerfallow seeded next year.
“I’m thinking if we get half of those acres seeded next year, we’ll be doing good,” said Burns, who installed triple tires on his combine to harvest 10 bushel canola and 25 bushel wheat.
“The crunch will come next year.”
