One storm can make the difference between a good year and bad one for farmers.
In farming, the risks are high. And there are some trains of thought that should not be followed.
The soybeans in front of our yard look healthy. The yellow patches visible from the road seem to be fading i nto t he plant’s natural shade of green. But what looms in the back and front of every farmer’s mind is some variation of, “We’re 10 days from a drought and three inches from drowning.”
There were dry years in the ’ 80s. I’ve heard my parents speak of them. There were dry years with formidably high interest rates. I was alive then. I wasn’t old enough to have any loans but the stories from this period strike closer to home than those stemming from the Dirty Thirties.
Many f armers making payments on l and were forced to sell. Farms that could, grew, gobbling up acres that were not previously for sale. It’s a memorable period for every Canadian farmer, especially for those who struggled to make ends meet.
I can’t speak to the internal life of an Alberta farmer, who, having suffered a wet fall last year has to harvest a worthless crop in spring instead of seeding a new one. I can’t speak to this amount of stress. I can only express how important it is to understand that the absolute loss of a year’s worth of income and a lot of food can come at the hands of one storm.
My farm is a few dozen kilometres from the U. S. border. It’s typically warmer here than in Winnipeg. We have a longer growing season and, as such, can grow different varieties. A plant that matures in 100 days is quite distinct from a plant that matures in 105.
But, longer season varieties push the season back, and frost can kill or irreparably damage a living plant.
Monitoring the weather and tracking its various systems across the Prairies is paramount to farming. To see a rain event in the forecast and postpone fieldwork until it passes is rolling the dice. Our farm’s heavy soils dry slower than our light ones and there’s no predicting what that cloud will do.
As complex as the mechanisms behind agriculture have become, what a plant needs to survive is simple and unchanging: plants need the right amount of water and sunshine to grow. That is, plants need the right weather conditions.
The sector is rife with weather pundits, amateur meteorologists, mapping technologies and trusted sources, all promising to be the final word on this growing season’s weather. Trusting one of these is lazy farming. Instead, we look at them all, hoping each source will slowly reveal a larger more accurate picture of what is happening and what is going to happen above our fields. Sometimes this works, but most often the trends that affect our farms are largely unpredictable.
Some folklore estimates absolute crop loss to happen one in every 10 years. In some areas, it’s been longer than 10, so the expectation is for, “any time now.”
Ask a farmer about climate change, taking into account t hat he or she has probably watched the weather more intensely over a longer period of time than you ever have. This doesn’t make them right. But it makes them worthy of a few minutes of your time.
“We could use a bit of rain, eh?” said my dad, not as much asking a question as starting a conversation. “It’s not crucial yet, but it could be shortly.”
It is this conversation that will be repeated throughout the early stages of the growing season. The plants are developing and thirsty right now; but not too thirsty.
When it rains, we want it to stop soon, fearing drowning and disease. When it’s dry, we’d like a slow inch of rain. When it’s hot, we worry about wilt. And when it’s cool, it sure would be nice if it would warm up a bit.
My t ext t hreads with other farmers are largely focused on weather. A farm two miles south of mine may receive a different amount of rain or none at all.
A farmer 10 miles west may be able to tell me what to expect out of that system tracking my way.
There is a closet meteorologist in all of us farmers. But you would be no different if the clouds determined the size of your paycheque. I watch the weather and cling to the belief that everything will work out.
Plants are overall resilient things. They live because, like all life on Earth, they want to.