Examining crops in the Municipal District of Willow Creek

By Mickey Dumont
With the harvest well in hand, it’s the time of year prognosticating producers look through their crystal balls at their crops to try once again to predict what the harvest outcome is.
Asked if the harvest is looking above or below average, Municipal District of Willow Creek Agricultural Service Board Member at Large for the Central Region Josh Fankhauser weighed in.
“That’s a tricky one,” says Fankhauser. “My gut tells me slightly below. It’s a weird one. Put it that way.”
In her weekly crop report, Agriculture and Irrigation Crop Statistician Brooklyn Wong reports “provincially, harvest progressed nine per cent to 63 per cent complete. This is still significantly ahead of the 5- and 10-year averages of 43 and 38 per cent complete. Regionally, the south is most complete at 80 per cent.”
The five year average for this date is nearly 70 per cent while the 10-year average is calculated at 64 per cent.
“Things have been dry the past couple of years and then things were looking pretty good,” Wong. “Then we had a lot of heat in July when plants were in their reproductive stages that created some yield quality issues. It will be really hard to tell what the final outcome of that is until the end of harvest. Yields are expected to be above (long term averages) but right now lots of the comments are sounding like yields are faring okay, but the quality isn’t maybe there in comparison to its average.”
“We’ve got lots of biomass, lots of straw, but it’s just not yielding like you think it should,” said Fankhauser. “Last year was kind of the opposite. Last year below average, but you had ‘you’re like, ‘how is there that much grain with that skinny of a plant? So, it’s kind of a little different. So, yeah.”
“With 3 of the 5 (provincial) regions experiencing significant showers, combining progress was delayed around the province,” said Wong. “Some areas experienced only delays of a day or two while others remained too tough to combine over several days,” her recent report says.
The statistician added, “While conditions are not favourable, showers this week were beneficial.” The five year average for tame hay in the south zone is rated as 28 (23) per cent good to excellent.
“Winter cereals did really well and the hay crop did a lot better than it has, but they’re all a little more ugly than everybody thought,” said Fankhauser. “From rumours in the country there’s nobody going ‘everything was just awesome’. Let’s put it that way.”
Drought and market conditions sparked some changes in what producers here planted. But Fankhauser isn’t picking winners and losers.
“I know some guys have really trimmed canola in the last few years. Canola is supposed to be the shining star in the Canadian cropping economy, but it just hasn’t been the case for lots down here,” he said.
“When times are tough it’s just always hard to beat a nice wheat crop in this country. It’s kind of a standard that we measure everything off of, or you’re averaging out better than or worse than a nice wheat crop, and that’s kind of how you determine what to grow,” he said.
Producers here stick to a six-year crop rotation. “We don’t vary from it too much because you are thinking multiyear with chemicals and weeds, etc.
“So, once you start messing with it, then you mess with your whole system. So, yeah, we’re not, we’re not changing much. I mean, you can switch between wheat or barley, or switch between some of the cereals, but it’s pretty hard to just, you know, if you’re kind of slated for a cereal, you’re kind of stuck with cereal, and if you’re slated for a pulse, you’re stuck with a pulse.”