Pressure-system changes and a twisting jet stream failed to meet atmospheric moisture from the Pacific or Gulf, at least over much of the Prairies this May and early June.
Even daytime heating didn’t deliver the $2 billion rain, for which much of 60 million acres of Western Canadian grain land thirsts.
Some of my neighbours got a couple of inches from showers, most got a few tenths and not much more.
I envied them. For more than a month, much of the West has gone without a rain. We have received almost none at our farm south of Regina.
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In the farmyard or the field, I watched every dark cloud. I welcomed the cold from the north when it arrived, not the frost, but the cold’s ability to slam into southerly moist air and the resulting general rain that should have come from the collision. Instead, we got just the high, cold winds, dry clouds and rainless rainbows.
Along the American border, on the south side, they got two days of rain in the third week of May.
As I cleaned seed in a metal building when the temperatures spiked and sun met no interference, I welcomed the sweat that stuck the grain dust to my skin and ran scratchy salt into my eyes.
Daytime heat would bring a late day shower. That’s all I needed, a good shower, like the one I suspected the neighbours got. But no rain came.
Spraying or seeding, I checked the weather radar on my phone every few passes in the field, hoping that one new green blotch or another would turn purple or yellow, indicators of serious precipitation.
I watched the weather systems traipse across country as shoulders of dark clouds trailing darker, wind-blow skirts of rain
All were just light green on the radar, making enough spit to Dalmatian my tractor’s windows as the seeder stirred up the dust.
Several times this year, I set the shanks a half inch lower in search of 10 days supply of water for the seeds.
I questioned every setting and boosted the seeding rates. Maybe those extra five seeds per foot would be the ones that wouldn’t die before the moisture runs out in the inch thick band of mud that I have squeezed them into.
Every so often my phone would ring in the tractor and a reporter or editor would ask something about drought coverage for the coming weeks.
You can read a lot about it in these papers. But, for all of us, I hope not for much longer.
