E. Cora Hind was famous for being able to peg the prairie wheat crop in a time in which guesstimates were usually way WAY off. Good solid sense, agronomic understanding, observational powers and the willingness to drive hundreds of miles made Hind, the agriculture editor for the Winnipeg Free Press, a world famous crop forecaster.
Well, I’m certainly no E Cora Hind, but Itraversed vast acreages of Manitoba farmland yesterday – about 1,400 kilometres of it, from Steinback to Virden to Dauphin to Steinbach – and I’m willing to offer my analytical view of the situation: appallingly bad.
I went along on a flight over Manitoba with the president of Keystone Agricultural Producers yesterday, and what I saw was stunning. Vast acreages are unseeded, and weeds are going wild across much of Manitoba. Pools of water stand in many fields. Big new lakes have appeared where there should be crops. Lakes have spread out over wide plains and flooded pastureland and cropland.
The weirdest thing, the element that really made me feel like I was in a time warp, was the fact that in four hours of flying, at only about 2,000 feet, we saw only one farm machine moving. That was a sprayer on KAP president Doug Chorney’s land, and that’s on the edge of one of Manitoba’s few areas where the crops mostly got in and have emerged. Elsewhere we saw nothing moving at all. It was like mid-April, before much field work has been done, except that the lines of trees were all green and some fields appeared to have a lot of growth.
That growth almost everywhere was weeds.
Now, I don’t know how anyone can figure out from what I saw how much got seeded across the whole province, or across Saskatchewan. The fields I saw that had clearly been seeded looked like they’d just been seeded, because just a hint of green was appearing in the black. So I don’t know how you assess those late crops’ chance of producing a good crop.
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E Cora Hind isn’t with us any more. But this is the kind of situation in the field that would have challenged her prodigious crop forecasting abilities to the maximum. What Statistics Canada – which has a report out Thursday – or anyone else forecasts for the crop this year, it’s going to be just a guess.
That might mean good things for farmers who have a crop in the field now. But for the thousands of farmers whose flooded fields I flew over yesterday, market reaction to this situation won’t mean much. They won’t have much of a crop to sell, whatever the market does.
