Wet fields mean that farmers are still sitting on their hands some two weeks after they’d usually be plowing rows and planting seeds.
A late spring plus plenty of snow has made most of Sturgeon County too wet to seed, pushing back the start of the crop season by about two weeks.
The fields are mud, said Terry Bokenfohr, who farms between St. Albert and Morinville, and there’s still plenty of water left in the potholes. “The water has just started to quit running in the last few days or so.”
AndrĂ© Montpetit of Sturgeon Valley Fertilizer said he didn’t know of any county farmer who had started planting as of May 6, and suspected most would have to wait until the 15th before conditions were dry enough to start. Seeding usually starts around May 1.
The cause was the late spring, said Ralph Wright, manager of Alberta Agriculture’s meteorology program. The Edmonton region still had about 130 millimetres of water locked up in snow on its fields as of April 14, he noted –almost 10 times as much as usual.
“That’s equivalent to more than the average June rainfall, so that’s quite a bit,” Wright said. “We haven’t seen anything like that since 1982.”
There was still snow on the ground by April 27, Montpetit said, not counting the snowstorm of April 29, and the ground needs at least two weeks of warmth to get dry enough for plowing.
If seeding gets delayed much beyond May 20, Montpetit said, farmers may have to switch to faster growing crops such as oats or barley instead of wheat and canola if they want to have their crops ready by the fall. “We’re kind of racing against the calendar here.”
Statistics Canada’s latest field crop report predicts that farmers will plant about 19.1 million acres of canola nation-wide, down about 11.1 per cent from 2012, making this the first decrease in canola acreage nationally since 2006.
Albertans expected to plant about 5.9 million acres of canola, the report read, or about 8.6 per cent less than last year, and about 6.4 million acres of spring wheat – up 10.5 per cent from last year.
Right now farmers will be counting up the amount of growing days they’ll have this season to figure out what to plant, Bokenfohr said. Some might consider fast-growing canola at the risk of lower yields, while others might switch from wheat to barley.
“The best market for wheat is typically the higher quality wheat,” he said, and wheat needs a lot of time to mature. The closer we get to first frost, the riskier wheat becomes.
All this water means that soil moisture levels are at near normal levels for most of Edmonton, Wright said, which will be a plus when seeding starts. “We’re seeding into moisture and we’ve got a lot of warm weather coming up.”
Seeding is one of the most important parts of a farm’s operation, Montpetit said, so it’s vital to get it right. Farmers should make sure their equipment is properly calibrated and their seeds are of high quality before they head out into the fields this month.
Farmers also tend to work long hours during seeding, he continued, which opens the door to mistakes and accidents. “Some guys are talking about working 24-hour (days).” He urged farmers to use caution and to follow all safety procedures.
Farmers are looking for warm, dry weather for the next few weeks during seeding, Bokenfohr said, followed by a bit of rain in early June.
So far, Mother Nature is co-operating: Environment Canada predicts clear skies and highs in the mid-20s for most of this week.
Visit www.agriculture.alberta.ca for more crop weather information.
