Due to some very heavy rain and hail recently in Mountain View County, there has been some crop damage, although officials are not yet able to comment on the exact scope or offer a guess as to how the growing season will end.
Bob Temoshawski, supervisor of on-farm inspections for the Agriculture Financial Services Corporation (AFSC), told the Gazette his teams are currently in the process of inspecting flooded or overwatered fields in the district, and will soon be moving onto hail damaged ones.
“We have a couple things going on. Probably yes there are drowned out areas with an excess of water that have started yellowing,” said Temoshawski.
Another problem relates the fact that because the young crops have had a very moist field early in their growth, their root systems didn't run very deep because they didn't need to.
Now that the weather is drying up and staying warm a bit more, the plants need to expand their roots instead of their stalks, he said.
“So a lot of it we'll deal with in the fall at harvest time, and some of it we deal with now, so it's sort of a mixed bag. And with the increased moisture also comes diseases,” he noted.
“So we have a lot of issues going on right now, but it's nothing new. We've lived through this before in this part of the world. We don't live in Alberta because of the weather.”
Some lands have flooded worse than others due to their slope and location, so some are worse off than others, and the east end of the county is looking better than the west end at this time because of how the rain (recent) fell, he added.
“The overall picture? I guess we can't call it normal, but we've seen this before. It's not really a surprise, although that amount of rain in spring is. But I mean we could be in worse shape, look at the poor guys out east in Saskatchewan and Manitoba,” he said.
As far as whether the drowned crops will revive, it's really hard to tell at this point in time, he said.
“The plants are kind of a wonderful thing. They have one sole purpose in life, and that is to survive. A plant will go through a lot of stress to survive before it gives up,” he said.
The growing conditions aren't ideal out right now, although this is nothing new, he said.
For all he knows, if the frost comes as late as last year, producers could still be seeing another bumper crop, he noted.
“The last three years we had late late falls – everything came up nice. We had hail, we had late crops and everything, but we had really nice falls. All of a sudden everything turned around and last year was a pretty good crop,” he said.
“This time last year things were looking rough too. There are so many factors involved. So at this point in time, below normal (precipitation) to the west, above normal to the east. Are we going to be seeing losses? Probably, but the extent is unknown at this point. It's just too early to tell from our point of view.”
