Reports of fall soil moisture levels could cause a little dampness around producers’ eyes.
The situation is reminiscent of 2001, the driest fall in 100 years. That dehydrated season kicked off the drought of 2002, a crop year that is etched in farmers’ minds like cracks in the ground.
“We’re sort of nipping on the heels of that going into the next growing season,” said Bruce Burnett, director of weather and crop surveillance at the Canadian Wheat Board.
Environment Canada has prepared a model of what it thinks soil moisture conditions looked like under continuously cropped stubble as of Halloween.
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Much of southern Alberta and Saskatchewan is categorized as extremely dry on that map, which means the available moisture in the soil is less than 30 percent of capacity.
A similar map constructed by the wheat board shows almost all of the farmland in the western Prairies is below 40 percent of its water-holding capacity. Manitoba is the only province in decent shape.
“That’s not good,” was Burnett’s interpretation of the CWB’s map, which indicated that Saskatchewan and Alberta are in big trouble.
“We’ve got a fairly dry soil reserve and of course that’s the bank that we count on for next year’s growing season.”
Alberta Agriculture’s soil moisture map shows that 94 percent of the province has insufficient reserves for recropping next spring. Government officials said many areas of the province will require above average spring precipitation to reduce the risk of a drought in 2004.
Rick Raddatz, a meteorologist with Environment Canada, said the top 120 centimetres of prairie soil can generally hold about 200 millimetres of water.
His map shows the soil contains less than 60 mm of water in almost all of southern Saskatchewan and two large pockets in Alberta -surrounding Lethbridge and an area stretching east between Edmonton and Calgary.
Those dry areas need 140 mm of moisture to get back to what Raddatz calls “field ready” condition.
“You’re talking about over 51/2 inches of water. It is unlikely that we’re going to get that much precipitation between now and planting. In fact it’s extremely, extremely unlikely.”
Snow cover is below normal for most of the central and northern areas of the Prairies. Even in regions where there have been winter storms, the snowfall won’t do much to recharge soil moisture come spring.
“It takes 10 inches of snow to make an inch of water,” said Raddatz.
Most of the melted snow pack ends up as runoff, which is critical for recharging dugouts and streams but has minimal impact on cropland.
That means the extremely dry areas on the Environment Canada map will be equally parched on the other side of winter, said Raddatz.
Burnett said growers in the affected areas might want to contemplate planting more drought tolerant crops like wheat and barley
in 2004, rather than small-seeded specialty crops and oilseeds.
“If we did remain dry through into the spring season, we would definitely have some problems with germination and development of some of those crops.”
Raddatz thinks fertilizer is the more important consideration. Farmers may not want to spend money on inputs if their crop prospects aren’t that great, especially those that require water to work properly. But he also pointed out that crops rely on rainfall as well as soil moisture reserves. Two-thirds of the 300-350 mm of water it takes to grow a wheat crop usually comes in the form of rain.
“What makes or breaks your crop is whether you get that timely rainfall during the early part of the growing season.”
In other words, just because it’s as dry as it was in the fall of 2001 doesn’t mean farmers are necessarily facing a drought like they endured in 2002.
