SODDEN SPRING HAS LED TO LATE HARVEST WOES
Corn, soybean farmers make record-high insurance claims
Farmers are still harvesting corn and soybeans in Ontario after a stressful late planting season and record crop insurance payouts after the wet spring.
The $65 million paid for unseeded acreage to insured farmers who never got to plant a crop by the insurance deadline was the first of two record-breaking payouts this year.
Agricorp, which handles crop insurance on behalf of the provincial government, had claims for almost 300,000 unseeded acres, the highest in the history of production insurance that dates back about 50 years, said Stephanie Charest, Agricorp’s senior manager of corporate communications.
Another $31 million was paid to insured farmers in reseeding claims, mostly for winter wheat.
“Both of those were records,” Charest said Thursday.
Winter wheat growers who did harvest a crop in the summer received $18 million for yield shortfalls. Insured farmers can receive compensation if their harvested yield is below their guaranteed level of production.
There may be more insurance claims on the way as farmers continue to harvest the late-planted corn and soybeans. Agricorp is telling farmers to call before the Dec. 15 deadline for spring-seeded crops even if they won’t be done harvesting or are having trouble because it’s too wet.
“We’re here to help,” Charest said. “It was absolutely a stressful year.”
About half of the grain corn crop may still be left in fields in Ontario.
Ben Rosser, a corn specialist with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, said in some areas including Lambton County and the Niagara region, farmers are just starting to harvest corn. He said a stretch of warm weather in late September and October helped the late-planted corn mature before frosts came.
“Things could have been worse,” Rosser said.
It’s too soon to know what the yields may be and there will be added costs to dry the corn.
The fields in parts of Essex County are still too wet for farmers to finish harvesting grain corn and soybeans, the county’s largest field crop by acreage.
Horst Bohner, a soybean specialist with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, called 2019 a year of extremes.
“One to remember, not so much for anything good,” Bohner said.
Some key August rains saved the soybean crop for many growers in southwestern Ontario from Windsor to the London area, Bohner said.
Parts of Essex County and Lambton County with heavy clay soils were extra late in planting and some growers in the Niagara region never got to plant soybeans, he said.
And some fields in parts of central Ontario and Bruce and Grey counties didn’t get the timely August rains, he said.
“For many of us it turned out better than expected,” Bohner said.
The majority of about three million acres of soybeans in Ontario was harvested in October.
The five-year provincial average is 47 bushels per acre and it looks like the majority of yields were in the low 40s, Bohner said.
Some growers got less than 20 bushels per acre, he said.
“I talked to somebody in Essex last week who’d had the best crop they’d ever had and then I talked to somebody three concessions over and they had a mediocre crop.”
It was such a wet spring that soybeans were planted a month later in June and July.
“It was likely the latest planting season we’ve ever had in the last 40 years,” Bohner said.
Partly because some farmers never got to plant corn or soybeans, there’s more than a million acres of winter wheat planted, Bohner said.
That’s much larger than what was planted last year in the 600,000-acre range.
It was likely the latest planting season we’ve ever had in the last 40 years.