Dry winter a concern for Atlantic farmers
To everything, there is a season.
For farmers, those seasons tend to be unpredictable, often blending together under changing weather conditions.
“We are always dependent on the weather,” said Tim Marsh, a dairy farmer from Poplar Grove in western Hants County who serves as vice-president of the Nova Scotia Federation of Agriculture.
“With the lack of snowfall that we’ve had and what rain we’ve had has run right off, the aquifers are going to take a pounding if we get a dry summer,” said Marsh, who daily milks 90 Holsteins in a herd of about 200 cattle on some 240 hectares of cleared dykeland.
“Actually, it will affect a variety of farming,” Marsh said of the lack of moisture caused by a relatively snow-free winter. “The fruit and vegetable growers are going to have to irrigate a lot, probably. In the livestock sector, we may be facing the same thing we did two years ago when there was a scarcity of feed. It can affect the tree fruit guys. Moisture affects everybody, but to what degree.”
Marsh said an increase in spring and summer moisture could change the water on the beans.
“A wet spring would make a difference or if we got adequate rainfalls throughout the spring and summer months,” Marsh said. “If we can get some steady rains, that’s probably the best thing of all. It’s really challenging with changing climate.”
Cindy Day, the chief meteorologist with the Saltwire Network, said Marsh and the rest of Nova Scotia’s farming community might get their wish.
“It does look like that temperatures will be at or above seasonal values through the mid- to late spring and into the summer and precipation above normal,” Day said.
“So a warm but wet weather summer ahead. That will be mostly provincewide, just the way the jet stream is going to sit and the position of the Bermuda High would put us on the warm side of things but on a track with fairly significant weather through the summer.”
Without that significant rainfall over the next several months, Marsh said farmers will have to turn to irrigation to water their crops in the short term.
“Some people are irrigating right out of surface watercourses, surface water like ponds and lakes and rivers,” Marsh said. “There are a few people who are pulling water from drilled wells and shallow wells. It just depends on where they are in their operations. They will pump it out to whatever irrigation system they use.”
In the long term, Marsh said changing weather trends that bring dryer ground will force farmers to find new ways of doing things.
“Long term, it will mean we’ll be changing what type of crops we can grow. It puts the pressure back on farmers to what type of food supplies we can provide our fellow citizens. Different things, or maybe different varieties, maybe something that’s more heat-stress tolerant. We are looking at that with forages for livestock. Some guys are looking at varieties that can get by with a little less water. Or we have to develop better . . . structures to harvest what water is in the soil profile. It’s no one easy fix for any one sector.”
Despite dire warnings of global warming and changing long-term weather patterns, a Nova Scotia
government website indicates that precipitation will increase and growing seasons will become longer in the province in future years. A climate data map compiled from information gathered by the Meteorological Service of Canada projects that annual temperatures will rise from an average of 6.4 degrees in the 1980s to 7.5 degrees in the 2020s and up to 8.7 by the 2050s.
Precipitation is projected to rise in each of the four seasons from the 1980s to the 2020s, producing an annual average of 1,385.2 millimetres in the 2020s as opposed to 1,351.8 in the 1980s. It is also projected that there will be more days with both snow and rain in the 2020s than there were in the 1980s.
The growing season throughout the province is projected to increase by nearly two weeks, from 179.9 days in the 1980s to 192.2 days for the 2020s.
Marsh said anything is possible with climate change but he’s not convinced the projections will hold water.
“The climate is changing. It will be interesting to see if that comes to pass. We gotta to see how things unfold on us. Even the best projections can be wrong. I tend to be a little skeptical. . . . The change is the ultimate word in what’s happening and how we can adapt and work around it.”
He said farmers are the ulti- mate chameleons when it comes to changing on the fly.
“Farming overall seems to be changing,” he said. “Mother Nature is always quick to surprise us. We expect another dry summer but we may get adequate rains. We may get a wet spring that will turn into a wet summer. Farmers try to adapt and make use of what we get thrown at us.”
Marsh said many people from the general population probably wouldn’t last in the farming business.
“Overall, farmers are some of the most optimistic people you will ever find. Most of us look at the glass as half full. There are challenges, but that’s part of our business.”
Mother Nature is always quick to surprise us. We expect another dry summer but we may get adequate rains.
Tim Marsh Dairy farmer