It took a few seconds for Bill Plunz to find the right way to describe this year’s wild rice harvest.
“I guess dismal is a reasonable word to use,” said the general manager of La Ronge Wild Rice Corp.
Gerry Ivanochko, northern agriculture specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture, had similar phrasing.
“It’s the worst ever,” he said.
Crops were swamped this year by the highest water levels seen by the province’s growers in three or four decades.
Ivanochko estimated more than 200 Saskatchewan growers harvested 350,000 pounds of wild rice in 2005, an abysmal output when compared to the 10-year average of 2.5 million lb.
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That makes for back-to-back lousy crops coming off last year’s harvest of 725,000 lb., reaffirming the cyclical nature of a crop that yielded three million lb. in 2003 and 4.4 million lb. in 2002.
“We seem to have gone from record production to record poor production,” Ivanochko said. “It’s just extremes, nothing in between.”
Manitoba’s crop isn’t any better.
“I don’t think anybody has wild rice this year,” he said.
Plunz said volumes will be way down at the plant he manages, which is the largest wild rice facility in Canada.
“We’re expecting to process only about 200,000 lb.,” he said, which is down substantially from the average of 1.5 million lb. and the previous high of three million lb. A poor year is usually considered to be 550,000 lb.
Heavy rains
What started out to be an average year quickly deteriorated as heavy summer rain boosted water levels in northern lakes to the point where plants became stressed and died. Any lingering hopes of salvaging a decent crop were doused by soaking rain during the last week of August and the September long weekend.
Harvest was also hampered by hail and strong winds, Ivanochko said.
The small crop that did come off is in surprisingly good shape and is fetching prices of $1.05 per green lb., which is 40 percent higher than the average going rate.
“The price to producers is much higher this year but it doesn’t really matter if there isn’t any rice,” Plunz said.
He added that there is a fair inventory of processed product from last year’s harvest so exporters should be able to fill demand from their major wild rice customers in Europe and North America.
“It’s not that we’re right out, but certainly there will be limited opportunity for developing new markets, that’s for sure,” he said.
