Rain, rain go away, at least for a few days.
Many local farmers in the area are probably wishing this would happen so they can complete their fall harvest. Heavy rains over the past couple of weeks have prevented farmers from completing their harvest and Starland County Agricultural Fieldman Al Hampton said harvest right now is, “at a stand still.”
“It is getting extremely wet in most of our area and that is going to cause us some grief. As strange as it is, you go from really, really dry conditions early in the year, and now we’ve got actually really, really wet conditions,” he said.
He told The Mail that although the area is on track for about average rainfall, it has received most of that rain in the last month. That equals about seven to eight inches in Morrin and areas close by.
“There is a little bit of harvest that has been done. Most of the peas are completed. Cereals and Canola, basically guys have barely got started on, I doubt we’d be 20 per cent completed. Harvest in Starland would be maybe 20-25 per cent that would be about it,” he said.
“It can be a long drawn out process,” he explained, “particularly with really wet soils, and wet fields, that will make everything a little more of a struggle.”
The other side of it is, Hampton explained, there are many fields that might have had a second growth or crop that came up at two different times, those ones are still presenting a problem because of uneven maturity from dry conditions in the Spring and early Summer and now wet conditions in late Summer.
Hampton said because of the Canadian dollar being down, the commodity price is much lower than last year, and even lower than years previous to that.
“With our Canadian dollar sinking, it softens the blow a little bit as far as at least price wise,” he said, continuing by saying any farmers looking to buy equipment would expect to pay a much higher cost because it is based on the US dollar.
Hampton said the small amount of frost we had at the beginning of September wouldn’t be as much of a factor on the harvest as the amount of rain that has fallen.
“It is going to cause some significant downgrading to cereals I would think. Malt barley is going to be fairly valuable because there isn’t going to be too much Malt barley around with the type of weather we are having,” he said.
“The ground at least on this heavy clay is starting to get to a point where it is at full field capacity and water is starting to stand in areas. That is going to be a bit of a problem. We are getting into the time of year where we are going to have more darkness than daylight and things don’t dry out that fast,” he said.
Hampton explained that in years past, many times harvest has taken place in October and he predicts this will happen this year as well.
