It has been an extremely stressful spring for Bryan Gacek.
Gacek, who farms with his dad near Peace River, Alta., has been dealing with saturated conditions, making it difficult to harvest last year’s crop and seed another one.
“We seeded everything into mud. There is no dry ground anywhere,” he said. “It’s unbelievable. I’ve taken a shovel, dug a hole into the field and watched water fill from underneath.”
Many areas in Alberta’s northern and Peace regions have been extremely wet. Non-stop rains have delayed field operations, putting farmers in a bind.
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According to Alberta’s latest crop report, the northwest and Peace regions are 98 percent complete with seeding, though it’s expected there will be unseeded acres.
As well, the wet conditions are variable within counties.
“When you look at averages, it seems promising, but it’s very site specific,” said Sebastien Dutrisac, an agriculture fieldman with Northern Sunrise County.
“Generally we’re about 70 percent done for harvesting spring wheat and barley, but there are some spots that have done very little.
“They are really struggling,” he continued. “In the micro climate areas, it keeps raining and raining. It’s almost impossible to harvest.”
Lamont County, northeast of Edmonton, declared a state of agricultural disaster last week after floods soaked fields and washed out roads. At one point last week, more than 40 roads were closed.
Farmers in the county have been challenged with wet springs and falls for the past four years.
The conditions, combined with farmers’ inability to remove crops from the 2019 harvest, will cause them financial hardship, according to the county.
The declaration raises awareness of farmers’ challenges in Lamont, and allows producers to access provincial and federal dollars if they are made available.
Terry Eleniak, an agriculture fieldman for Lamont, said last week that producers still have a ways to go. From his conversations with farmers, some have 450 acres to 1,200 acres of crop that still need to be harvested.
“They are concerned,” he said. “No matter how much you have left out, it’s still abandoned land. We’ve had some producers ending up working wee hours of the morning trying to get their crop in.”
Eleniak said the county has received 175 to 289 millimetres of rain over the past two weeks.
He said he expects some acres to go unseeded. As well, he said some producers are considering chem-fallow, using the acres for a fall-seeded crop.
“At least with the moisture that’s in the ground, they could get some crop in and hopefully get an early start for 2021,” he said.
“I sympathize for the producers. The last three to four years have been a no-win battle. I’m hearing it’s just not a nice business to be in right now.”
Gacek said this is the fifth year in a row where the conditions have been unfavourable.
He said he still has about 270 acres of canola in the field. They had a total of 1,400 acres of crop to harvest this spring.
Gacek said they had to stop harvesting so they could complete seeding. They managed to seed 75 percent of their acres.
“I’ve been farming for 30-plus years with my dad, who is 80 and has been farming for his whole life, and he said he has never seen anything like this before in his entire life,” he said.
“When we finally get a window of weather to go and actually do something, but then all of a sudden, it rains half an inch down for three days, it’s very disheartening. I wonder if we should be doing this. It pulls at everything.”
Dutrisac said the difficult years have taken a toll.
“I think it’s got to a point where it becomes desperate,” he said. “It’s not a one-off year, but three, four or five years for some of those micro areas. It’s hit them severely hard.”
According to the provincial crop report, only 41 percent of crops have emerged in the northwest region and 40 percent has emerged in the Peace. The five-year average for those areas is 82 percent and 79 percent, respectively.
