ST. FRANCIS XAVIER, Man. — Normal is great when you’re used to wildly varying conditions, so farmers in the Red River Valley have been enjoying it this spring.
“It’s shaping up to be a normal year,” said Gunter Jochum, who farms west of Winnipeg along the banks of the flood-prone Assiniboine River.
He managed to seed half of his 3,000-plus acres of cropland before a rainy and cold spell hit in the second week of May. That’s not bad.
He doesn’t have sheets of flood water covering his fields. That’s good. In 2011, he lost half his acres. In 2014, he lost 300.
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A few more warm, clear days and he’ll be able to complete seeding. He finished his wheat and oats May 10, and much of his canola is in the ground. The rest of the canola and his soybeans will go in when it’s dry and warm enough, which is expected to be in the days leading into the Victoria Day weekend.
The valley is an area of rich farmland lower and warmer than the rest of the Prairies, and farmers up and down the valley are enjoying the good conditions, although a frost has many checking the status of their early emerging canola crops.
Major areas of the valley are often covered by water into late May or early June, especially along the Red River and the network of smaller rivers coming off the escarpment to the west.
However, little has been lost to flooding this year, and neither has much acreage been lost to rain.
“Seeding has been going really quite well,” Manitoba Agriculture production adviser Ingrid Kristjanson said after checking a canola field east of Morris in the heart of the valley beside the Red River.
Farmers in her area have seeded most of their crops, and while they’re not far ahead of usual, they are nicely set up for the growing season.
“We’ll be looking for some timely rains and not big downpours,” she said.
The valley has a wider range of crops than most parts of Western Canada because of the warmer temperatures. Corn and soybeans are major crops, sunflowers have been long-term mainstays for many farmers, dry beans have held significant acres and oats was an important crop.
That is alongside the wheat and canola that virtually every farmer has in his rotation.
Jochum said no year will ever be ideal, and “normal” is a situation that never truly exists. Every farmer has his own ideal, and each producer will look at the same situation in different ways.
“I always like it just on the dry side, where you say, ‘jeez, I wish we had a little shower,’ than having it a bit too sticky,” said Jochum.
“Other guys like it a little more sticky and don’t want to worry about it being a little too dry.”
However, with no major disruptions or delays on hand, farmers in the valley are as happy as most can expect to be this year.
