Andre Charlot’s canola field of dreams became a nightmare last month.
“Before, the land was just like a garden. It was nice land and that (field) was the one that blew the most,” he said.
Charlot is referring to several days of strong northwest winds that blew across his land, obliterating a good chunk of his canola crop.
High winds hit south-central Manitoba the hardest in the third week of May. Winds of up to 100 km/h battered emerging crops. Dried out topsoil was flung into the air, where it buried or sandblasted freshly emerged canola, shearing off the tender stems.
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“In that case, there’s no chance of recovery. It quit that growing point and there’s no chance it’s going to grow through that,” said Angela Brackenreed, the Canola Council of Canada’s regional agronomist in Manitoba.
She said south-central Manitoba typically has lighter soil. Sandy knolls were most susceptible to the wind, but the damage was widespread.
One of these fields was Charlot’s 400 acres of canola near Emerson in the southeastern Red River Valley.
“We had two days of bad winds,” he said. “It’s not that they were fast. It’s just that they were steady, like 50 to 60 kilometres and after a while the topsoil gets so dry it finally starts to lift and blow.”
Charlot described his land as mainly flat with ditches running through. Many ditches after the windstorm were full of straw and dirt.
“I was amazed at how much the topsoil moved,” he said.
“On the hills (knolls) there was a couple of inches gone. It took not only the canola but the dirt too.”
He said the situation reminded him of the late 1980s, when the same thing happened to his emerging crops.
Jack Froese has also had crops destroyed by sandblasting, but nothing like May’s storm. The Winkler farmer had to reseed 1,100 acres of canola.
“It sheared off the stems, and the canola that was left there looked pretty sickly,” he said. “We had been fairly dry here as well. It didn’t take much to shear off the stems.”
Froese said he is amazed by how different this year’s growing season is from last year.
“It was kind of strange because last year it was so wet we only started seeding on the 16th of May and this year we were actually done for the first time on the 16th of May. And then we ended up reseeding these 1,100 acres — total opposite.”
Brackenreed put it another way.
“If there is a bright side to this, they were early to begin with so it definitely was not too late to reseed and they’re still in good position to maximize yield this year with when they seeded.”
