Don’t know what the accumulated totals will be. Can’t foresee how the rest of the growing season will unfold. But it’s raining. Finally. The first significant precipitation for this area in a long time.
You try to maintain faith when you’re pouring mounds of money into soil that’s getting drier by the day. But last year was proof that May can pass and so can much of June with hardly more than a shower to settle the dust.
Last year, there was good subsoil moisture. This year, not so much and plant growth has been reverting to drought survival mode.
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Winter annuals like flixweed and stinkweed have been racing to flower and set seed. Dandelions have flowers perched on short stems. Grass growth is patchy with areas never properly greening. The trees leafed early with caragana already pushing out yellow flowers.
If it weren’t for direct seeding and continuous cropping, there would have been major dust storms like back in the 1980s.
Seeding into moisture had become increasingly difficult. Shallow seeded crops would need to be seeded into dry soil or they would have to wait.
Now, there’s hope. Germination should be good on what has been seeded and what remains to be planted won’t have to be buried so deeply.
From the projections, it appears many dry western regions craving rain will end up disappointed. The rainfall lottery is often cruel.
Meanwhile, in the eastern half of the Prairies, where too much moisture has been a perennial problem, a big rain that delays seeding will not receive the same welcome.
This major rainfall event, which seems destined to provide widespread significant precipitation, could well be a defining event for the growing season.
For dry regions, these few days could have a great impact on ultimate crop yields. For pasture and hay land, early season precipitation is critical. Miss this and it becomes more difficult and expensive to feed your cows.
Short range weather forecasting seems to continually improve. How many times a day to you check the forecast on your phone? However, anything further out than a week or 10 days has limited reliability. Seasonal forecasts, even though we like to hear them, are largely a joke.
For all the talk of El Nino and La Nina, you can flip a coin or dissect a pig spleen and your guess could be just as good as any of the experts with their sophisticated weather models. Hopefully, the science will improve in the years ahead, but you can’t yet make business decisions based on medium and long-term weather forecasts.
Last year, victory was snatched from the jaws of defeat by late season rains. Many observers credit modern farming practices and want to believe we’ve become nearly impervious to drought.
Yes, there was an amazing turnaround in crop fortunes last year, but it had a lot to do with subsoil moisture reserves. In 1988 and 2002, huge areas had crop failures. That can and will happen again. It’s just a question of when. While most areas dodged a bullet in 2015, we won’t always be that lucky.
For 2016, in the dry western Prairies, your fortune could end up hinging on how much precipitation comes in this one rainfall event. One rain does not a season make, but if the tap turns off again, this rain will loom large.
