Recent rain has eased drought concerns that haunted much of the Prairies late last summer, at least in the first few inches of soil.
However, there isn’t a lot of moisture further down, and the drought isn’t entirely gone.
“There’s adequate moisture there to get everybody going, but we’re not going to be A-OK for the next four weeks until we get enough moisture,” said Scott MacKinnon, co-founder of Farmers Edge in Pilot Mound, Man.
“Moisture reserves aren’t high. They’re average to below average. We’re not looking at enough moisture to hold us for a month. We’re going to need something.”
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That’s a common story across the Prairies. Farmers have appreciated dry seeding weather, but dry summers haven’t left much in the moisture bank to carry a crop through to harvest.
Rain that was forecast for parts of the Prairies on the Victoria Day long weekend would have been a pleasant prospect for farmers with seeded crops but would have added more anxiety for others because of further seeding delays.
CWB weather and crop situation analyst Bruce Burnett said the soil moisture situation on the Prairies is a result of weather phenomena over the past year.
Last summer was dry almost everywhere except north-central Saskatchewan, and most soil went into the winter freeze-up with little subsoil moisture. However, a big snow pack blanketed the Prairies during the winter to add moisture and kept soil frost from going too deep.
A long, slow melt this spring allowed moisture to seep into the soil, and an extremely dry period then hit from mid-April to mid-May, with only 25 percent of average precipitation.
Most farmers had good topsoil moisture last week but relatively dry conditions in the subsoil. Farmers who get their crops seeded will quickly pivot to cloud watching, Burnett said.
“When it’s cool, (the low overall soil reserves) don’t seem to matter, but when it warms up and crops start using up some of that reserve we got from the snow pack, we’re going to need some moisture,” he said.
“You don’t have too much time before you need some rain.”
Most farmers won’t be in imminent danger of running out of soil moisture, particularly if predicted rain arrives.
The markets probably won’t start acting like drought is a possibility if the rains fall, said Chuck Penner of LeftField Commodity Research.
However, farmers from southern Alberta and southwestern Saskatchewan are beginning to report declining soil moisture reserves.
“It’s a weird deal,” said MacKinnon, who farms in southwestern Manitoba, which lost millions of acres due to spring flooding in 2011 and 2012.
“We’re coming off two years where we were drowning, but now we’re thinking about it becoming dry.”
