On the way down to Winkler on Friday for the Harvest Festival I saw a lot of lush, green, big crops growing in the rain.
Seas of golden canola were paired with tasseling corn and flowering pulses.
It all looked great – for a crop in the early parts of July. But this is getting on to mid-August and the crops in this part of the Red River valley, like most of the rest of the eastern prairies and many to the west, are a full month of development late right now. That, of course, is frightening everyone with the prospect of an early frost. There could be a great crop here, but it needs weeks of hot weather and no early frost. So everyone’s going to be anxiously watching that early September full moon.
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Farmers I spoke to at the festival, which was a damp but well-attended event, were uniformly optimistic about the ability of a very-late crop like this to catch up with enough good weather.
And we appear here in the eastern prairies to be likely to get that this week: hot, sunny weather for a few days is the forecast, so the crops are going to get their chance to show what they can do.
A situation like this could be a hedging nightmare for farmers. How much can you risk locking in when the whole thing could be wiped out by frost, but how much can you afford to leave unhedged when you might get a bin-busting crop? That’s not such a vexing problem right now because prices have slumped since that late July rally. Not too many people are going to feel like being stampeded into the prices now on offer.
So the eyes of farmers here in southern Manitoba and across the west will continue to be averted from the markets and instead on the progress of their crops. The dreary weather to this point of the season has a lot of folks glum, but if this week truly brings heat and roaring progress to crops in the eastern prairies, those looming frost dates won’t seem quite so frightening.
