Montreal Gazette

Rain produces smaller yields, lower-quality crops in Quebec

- KELSEY LITWIN

While driving through the Salaberry-de-Valleyfiel­d region in southern Quebec in mid-June, John McCart noticed farms in the area were sitting empty, void of the crops that should have been planted the month before.

It’s because of the rain, he explained. It was too wet to work in the fields.

The result: the quality of Quebec’s crops just won’t be up to par this year, he said.

“We missed a lot of sun in May and June,” explained McCart, who is the president of the Quebec Farmers’ Associatio­n. That lack of sun, combined with colder temperatur­es, increased humidity and spurts of hail in some regions of the province have hindered farmers’ ability to grow or maintain their crops, he said.

Smaller ears of corn are the result of the cold weather, McCart said. Cucumber, cabbage and cauliflowe­r are also at a higher risk for disease and fungus because of the wet weather and humidity.

Jeremie Meunier said his St-Jean-sur-Richelieu farm was two weeks behind on planting their corn crops, which will affect their overall season.

Grain crops neighbouri­ng McCart’s farm near Lachute, Que., are at least two weeks behind, as well. “And that’s speaking very optimistic­ally,” he said.

Montreal has experience­d 544 millimetre­s of rain in the last four months alone, according to Environmen­t Canada. That amounts to about two-thirds of Montreal’s annual average, based on numbers gathered by the federal agency between 1981 and 2010.

That rainfall has affected most of Quebec’s agricultur­al producers in one way or another, McCart said.

If the next 45 to 60 days are all clear skies, he said there’s a chance farmers could avoid a greater loss in revenue.

“We’re all anxious,” McCart said. “We need a lot of really nice weather from now until the middle of October.”

But three full months of sun might not be so likely, said Amélie Bertrand, a meteorolog­ist with Environmen­t Canada.

The 1981-2010 numbers show that Montreal’s four wettest months tend to be from August to November, with an average 387.4 mm of rain.

While they can’t predict what this fall is going to be like, Betrand said they’re expecting “more instabilit­y, with more showers and thundersto­rms” for the remaining summer months. Bertrand said these trends are normally caused by systems, such as the remains of tropical storms and hurricanes, moving north.

Bertrand emphasized, however, that thundersto­rms such as Monday’s are very localized and can dramatical­ly increase the amount of rain we receive in a short period of time, making the numbers seem worse than they really are.

She said if it weren’t for Monday’s 33-mm downpour, July would have been close the 30-year average, as opposed to the final 125 mm count. Taking the Greater Montreal region into account, she said the amount of rain that fell last month is still in the normal range.

To blame for this spring and early summer’s rain is a trough, Bertrand said. Found in the upper atmosphere, a trough is a condition that prohibits warm, southern air from making its way northeast and favours the formation of clouds — the source of McCart and his fellow farmers’ woes.

High water levels in the Great Lakes, and consequent­ly the StLawrence Seaway, persist as wet weather keeps coming, according to the Internatio­nal Lake Ontario—St. Lawrence River Board. In an attempt to lower the levels of Lake Ontario, the body of water is being drained at record speed: 10,400 cubic metres per second. The outflows have been set to that amount since June 14.

In a previous interview with the Montreal Gazette, Jacob Bruxer, a senior water resources engineer for Environmen­t and Climate Change Canada and a member of their board, explained that outflows will remain at that amount for the foreseeabl­e future. Their goal has been to strike a balance between lowering Lake Ontario’s water levels and preventing increased floods downstream in southern Quebec.

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