LAKE LENORE, Sask. – Bouncing over the field’s frozen ruts in a pickup truck on a cold fall morning, it’s hard to imagine a combine hung up on its belly in soupy gumbo.
Good moisture in 2004, combined with steady rains this August and September, have produced muddy conditions and both complicated and delayed harvest for northeastern Saskatchewan farmers like Craig and Aaron Yeager.
Beneath a deceptively firm soil surface lies what the Yeagers described as pottery clay, entrapping heavy equipment.
Adding duals to the combine has helped the Yeagers get into their fields of canola, barley, oats and canaryseed, but patience is proving to be their best asset.
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“The ground is like Jello,” said Aaron, who needed two four-wheel drive tractors to pull his combine out of thigh-deep, watery ruts in a canola field.
“The ground is just very unstable for sustaining any weight,” he said.
“You could feel it in the semi when the combine goes by, the ground just shook,” added Craig.
Early one morning, he headed out to finish swathing near a slough while the ground was still frozen. There are sloughs on his usually well-drained land that three generations of Yeagers have never before seen.
Flags mark a bumpy section of grid road where water was running over it weeks ago.
To prevent rutting in moist fields, the Yeagers are forced to half-fill trucks or auger their grain into trucks parked at the edges of fields or on the grid road.
They bought a grain cart this year to move the crop from the combine to the trucks, something that requires an extra worker and fuel, said Aaron.
“That reduces production time by one-third and right now time is of the essence,” he said.
Getting stuck in the mud is another time waster, said Craig, who recalled getting bogged down four times in some fields.
“The four-wheel drive tractor has been following around the combine,” joked Craig.
Just down the road from the Yeager farm, neighbours Reg and Eric Gerwing are digging out their combine with jacks, shovels and planks of wood after getting stuck the previous night.
They had just added duals to their new model tractor.
“The ground is like cow …. You don’t know where to go,” Reg said.
Other family members farming in the area have experienced similar
hangups, twice losing four hours of time pulling out equipment.
“You don’t want to be in a hurry. You just get yourself in a jam,” Gerwing advised the Yeagers.
Back at the Yeagers, a farmer drops by to see if Aaron can dry some of the wet grain coming off area fields.
Aaron said drying is worth the time and money, if you weigh a 15 percent weight loss against the cost of drying.
“I can dry a lot of grain for 15 percent,” he said. “The operation has a purpose. It’s done and it doesn’t come back to haunt you.”
He generally takes off one-third tough, one third dry and then mixes them to average them out.
The family balances farming’s highs and lows by operating an abattoir in their yard, doing custom spraying and grain drying and finishing a small herd of buffalo.
This year, the Yeagers hired a plane to do aerial applications on some of their swampier lands They also burned off some fields before seeding to blacken the soil and get more heat to the soil in the cool spring to help with germination and emergence, said Aaron.
Good rain and sunshine this spring and summer produced excellent crops in the area. A lot of grain is lying in uncovered piles in farmyards due to a lack of bin storage on farms and in local elevators, plugged with poor quality grain from last year.
Frosts are now having little impact, but dew on the fields means they cannot begin combining until mid to late afternoon.
The farm has already produced five car loads of malting barley, with the barley yielding 80 bushels per acre, canola averaging about 50 bu. and oats producing 100 bu.
“That’s better than normal,” Aaron said, recalling how last year’s August frost “kicked” a very good crop for Craig’s fields, but left his four quarters untouched.
Despite another week’s worth of combining and much spring work ahead smoothing out the ruts, the Yeagers remain optimistic about this crop year.
“No matter how bad it gets, it’s still better to be wet than dry,” he said.
Producers are generally pleased with the quality of crops taken off to date, but are less optimistic about the grade for the cereals and pulses still out in the field, said Terry Bedard of Saskatchewan Agriculture.
She said the province’s east-central and southern areas are most advanced in harvesting, while the northwest has made the least progress. Northeast and west-central zones were close to half done last week.
“The weather was cool, so things may not have dried out as much as they’d like,” said Bedard, who spotted sporadic combining around Saskatoon this past week.
“If there’s any opportunity to get out, they were doing it,” she said.
Southeastern Saskatchewan and southern Manitoba had most of its crop in the bin when heavy snow arrived last week.
Central, northeastern and Peace regions of Alberta continue to lag behind the rest of the province, with little combining reported around Red Deer last week.
