A Million Dollar Rain
A MILLION DOLLAR RAIN
A common impression of farmers is that they are always complaining about the weather! This may be the case, because as the weather plays such a huge part of the success or failure of the growing season, it is understandable that so much attention is focused on it. An untimely frost; a hail storm; not enough rain, or conversely too much rain at the wrong time can devastate an entire season’s potential.
If you’ve followed the news over the last couple of months, you may have heard about the widespread drought that is afflicting the prairies this summer - especially western Saskatchewan and eastern Alberta. For some areas, where the drought has been most persistent, there is little hope for much of a crop at all this summer.
Because of the lack of feed and pasture growth, many of the poorer crops will be baled up for livestock feed, Over all, the drought has been widespread enough and persistent enough that it is already clear that the prairie grain harvest will be substantially lower than average.
In our area, we had very little reserve moisture from last fall, less than average snowfall over winter, and no rain or showers this spring. In a widespread area, which included us, farmers were seeding into dry ground, causing very poor germination. But we have been very fortunate to have received some important rainfalls at just the right time to avert disaster… our first rain several weeks after seeding helped most of the seed germinate (although it also brought on more weeds than usual too!); The second rain several weeks later was just in time to keep the new crops growing, and earlier this week we received another inch of rain just as crops started to show signs of stress.
From what I have been able to gather, this rain has been quite widespread bringing relief to much of the drought stricken area, and, although late for some, has been incalculably valuable in improving the potential crop this year.
Although weedier than usual, we hope to harvest a reasonable quantity and hopefully an excellent quality of grain this year.
I will do some videos over the next week or two so that you can see some of the land that we are farming for Nature’s Path, and the progress that the crops are making… until then, we are placing our order for another valuable rainfall in about 2 weeks!
Garth Glass is a farmer from Western Saskatchewan that farms Nature’s Path’s recently purchased organic acreage.