A windstorm in southern Manitoba has forced farmers to reseed their crops and prompted a massive excavation of drainage ditches in the Rural Municipality of Morris.
Witnesses described the storm, which hit the area May 16-17, as a blizzard of topsoil, akin to the Dirty Thirties. Employees at the RM of Morris office said drivers on Highway 75, which runs from Winnipeg to the
U.S. border, were limited to a few hundred metres of visibility.
“We’ve had windstorms before, but never to this degree,” said Ralph Groening, who has farmed west of Morris for 32 years and is a councillor in the RM.
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Wind gusts topping 100 km-h out of the northwest ripped out newly planted crops and blew up to a metre of topsoil and stubble into ditches on the south ends of fields.
To maintain drainage in the flat municipality located in the Red River Valley, the RM will excavate 270 kilometres of ditches over the next several weeks.
“We estimate the cost to be in the neighbourhood of half a million dollars,” said Leo Kornelson, a councillor in the municipality, 50 km south of Winnipeg. The excavated debris will be put on the roadsides or the adjoining field.
The municipality surveyed the region from the air, Kornelson said, to assess the storm’s impact on the drainage system, not to evaluate the damage to cropland. According to Ingrid Kristjanson, a Manitoba Agriculture representative in Morris, the amount of reseeding required is still unclear.
“There are some farmers reseeding, but it really is on a field by field basis,” said Kristjanson. “Some (producers) will re-evaluate over a period of time, to see what kind of growth there is.”
A cool spring and drier than usual conditions contributed to the substantial loss of topsoil, Kristjanson said.
“On an average year, if we had a windstorm at this time, it wouldn’t have been an issue,” she said. “Crop would’ve been up and it would have held the soil.”
Groening agreed the timing of the wind was a major factor in the loss.
“Absolutely, we were just at that crucial period before crops emerge,” said Groening, who is waiting to see what kind of emergence he will get on his fields.
One of the crops most affected has been canola, a shallow-seeded crop.
“We’re basically in the cotyledon stage … so now we’re in a situation where the cotyledons are sheared off and there’s not enough of a root system developed that you can get regrowth,” Kristjanson said.
“The problems that I’ve heard of are fields where the seedlings were really cut off, because the debris just cut the plants off,” said Groening. “I’ve also heard of fields where the dirt was stripped away and the seeds are exposed.”
Another factor contributing to the loss of crop and topsoil is that zero tillage is not practised in the cool, wet soil near the Red River.
“No-till essentially doesn’t exist here, and that’s strictly a function of our heavy clay soils,” Kristjanson said. “It has been tried and it is very difficult to manage.”
Limited till is commonly practised in the RM, but Groening said the storm was too violent.
“The debris was ripped off the fields, together with the dirt,” he said.
To prevent a similar disaster in the future, he would like to see more shelterbelts in the wide open and flat lands west of Morris.
