Late rains taking costly toll on harvest

MINTO — Farmers are dealing with poor harvest conditions due to the high amount of rain that has fallen this month.

By Sept. 15, Brandon had received 74.7 millimetres of rain, a spokesperson for Environment and Climate Change Canada told the Sun on Wednesday. The amount is equal to 173 per cent of average rainfall for Brandon — with the past five years never seeing more than 38.8 mm during the month.

The wet conditions are causing crop loss and delays in harvesting, several Westman farmers told the Sun this week.

“At this point, it (could be) six figures of loss. And that all happens in days,” Cassandra Lepp, a Rivers-area wheat and canola farmer, said in a phone interview Wednesday. “We have good crops out there, and they are disappearing.”

Canola crops can’t be cut due to moisture levels, Lepp said. She is waiting for dryer conditions before harvesting, but the crop is dwindling while time passes.

“It’s profit dropping on the ground.”

In the case of wheat, the family was forced to harvest while the wheat carried “severe high risk” of spoiling due to high moisture level, she said. Wheat in the field had been sprouting — degrading in quality — and the farmers chose to bring it in rather than risk having it continue sprouting and take on more rain.

“You get hit with huge discounts,” Lepp said. “We never had sprouted grain before. This has never happened in 50 years.”

“We’re racing the clock at three miles an hour with combines, so you can only go as fast as you can go.”

The Manitoba government’s rain watch tool showed that as of Wednesday, Souris had recorded the wettest September in the region with 109.6 mm. Rivers received 50 mm, Wawanesa got 80 mm, Boissevain saw 57.1 mm, Minto received 74.8 mm and Virden got 70.8 mm.

Jake Ayre, a Minto-area farmer and vice-president of Keystone Agricultural Producers, was forced by an afternoon shower to cancel Wednesday’s harvest plans.

“Just as a whole in Westman, it’s been a challenging year that begins to bring more problems,” Ayre said.

“We have lost anywhere from 15 to 30 per cent of fields just due to drown out,” he said while standing beneath a tin roof with rain pattering above.

Ayre said farmers are dealing with a bottlenecking issue — having fallen behind schedule due to rain, and needing to bring several different crops off the fields at the same time. He said he is about 30 per cent behind schedule.

He has received calls from neighbours who are in similar positions, asking for help to harvest. Delays also create a lack of cash flow from delivering crops for sale, he said.

“You look at the field — that’s your bank account. That’s your revenue, and you slowly watch it fall away.”

Corn, soybeans and edible beans look good this year, and are expected to be least impacted by the rain, Ayre said.

Darren Chapman, a semi-retired farmer south of Virden, said the rain is also taking a toll in his area.

“The outlook and quality of the product is dropping, and cost of harvesting is going up, so your margin is getting smaller,” Chapman said Wednesday. “Yeah, it’s not good.

Chapman runs a combine at his family’s generational farm, now taken up by his younger brother. On rainy days, he said, they are preparing machinery so that the most work possible can be done when the weather clears.

“We’re going over the combines and checking for belts that got cracks and replacing them. Just trying to reduce your risk of breakdowns when the weather is good,” he said. “So hopefully, you got as much stuff that you’re aware of corrected.”

Chapman said a grain bin filled with 100,000 pounds got stuck in the field this year due to a slough of water — and it had to be emptied before being hauled out. The farm has rails laid to allow carts to drive over soft ground, but that doesn’t always prevent them from being stuck, he said.

“There’s all kinds of people getting stuck,” he said, and noted a close neighbour reported the same problem this season.

Lepp said she had the same problem, describing the conditions as a “nightmare.”

Keith Pearn, whose family farm is located northeast of Virden, said the lack of mobility on the farm is his biggest concern and noted his combine got stuck in a field this month following a period of rain. The machine eventually had to be towed.

“The land is just about too wet to travel on,” Pearn said on Tuesday. “We’re limited to where we can go with the equipment. There’s going to be low spots that won’t get harvested until either the ground freezes up or it won’t get harvested at all.”

His family was waiting to harvest canola that was still on the fields. He said aeration may be needed to dry the canola after it is harvested.

“There’s really not much you can do. You just got to wait it out,” he said. “Ordinarily, if you get a couple days of sun you can go again, but it’s probably going to take a week of drying weather to get the land dry enough to go on now. That’s the big concern.”

The wet weather may also limit work during the fall to maintain the land — it’s just not good timing for heavy rainfall, he said.

Trevor Hadwen, an agriclimate specialist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, said in an interview last month that August and September tend to be dry periods. While there are can be downsides, moisture can also have upsides when it comes late in the summer.

“If we get some rainfall there, the perennial crops tend to do much better the next season,” Hadwen said. “Their root systems tend to be able to develop and recover a little bit during the fall period, giving them a little bit of a boost in the spring, so you’ll get better hay crops, better pasture recovery, that kind of thing.”

The autumn can be a “recharge period” for soil moisture as the prairies are known for water deficits. The span of August and September is typically a dry period, he said.

But if a wet spring follows a wet fall, it could lead to flooding, he added.

» cmcdowell@brandonsun.com