Wet spring causing headaches for Canadian Prairie farmers

More than 2 million acres of unharvested crops left over from last fall in Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Those old crops need to be cleared out before new seeding can begin. Even then, the ground is still too wet to plant.

Unharvested crops, wet spring causing headaches for Prairie farmers https://t.co/8UI4kq03n0

— CBC Saskatchewan (@CBCSask) May 1, 2017

Alberta’s Agriculture Financial Services Corp. says there are about 400,000 hectares of insured unharvested crops left over from last fall. A similar amount of uninsured crops remain in fields. (A hectare is equivalent to about 2.47 acres.)

In Saskatchewan “over a million acres didn’t get combined last fall in the province,” said Todd Lewis, president of the Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan.

And in Manitoba, about 40,000 hectares were not harvested last fall, mainly in the southwest.

Water from rain and melting snow is soaking the grain and oilseed crops that farmers were unable harvest last fall due to bad weather.

And fields they did manage to harvest are too sodden to walk on, let alone seed, due to a cold and wet spring.

“I haven’t seen this much water lying around in all of the years I have farmed,” said farmer Humphrey Banack.

http://ift.tt/2qrPBQc

Thanks to Dave Whitton for these links

The post Wet spring causing headaches for Canadian Prairie farmers appeared first on Ice Age Now.

via Ice Age Now http://ift.tt/2qcAwB3

May 1, 2017 at 02:43PM