You’ve got your enhanced, fine-tuned, fool-proofed GM seed ready for planting.
Whatever custom fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides you think are necessary are standing by.
And you’ve got your Internet analyses and your e-mail production tips coming in fast an furious.
Out in the yard, you’ve got your $150,000 on-board computerized tractor and other state-of-the-art equipment just raring to make short work of it.
But what have you got if you haven’t got weather? Not much more than a bunch of machines sitting idle and another hard lesson that farming - at the core - hasn’t changed as much as appearances might lead one to believe.
Because, as we’ve all been reminded so harshly this spring and early summer, the whole damn shooting match comes down to weather... something that - amazing as that sounds in this day and age - man hasn’t yet figured out how to manage.
Without the whims of the weather on-side, you’re sitting there about as ready as your father or grandfather was with his battered John Deere, hit-and-miss seed and occasional advice from radio reports.
Have you seen The Perfect Storm, the big-budget Hollywood vehicle featuring heart-throb George Clooney which graphically shows what a contrary weather pattern can do to an ocean-going fishing crew when it puts its mind to it?
Well, Eastern Ontario farmers have just been through the equivalent of The Perfect Storm, weeks on end with hardly any respite when weather played them like suckers, making their hearts throb like Clooney groupies, tantalizing them with a few hours, maybe even half a day of sunshine, leading them to think they might get out on the fields, only to snatch it back with a sudden downpour of torrential proportions.
If only we could get two days - even a day - farmers prayed as they eyed their sodden acres, wondering early on whether or not to switch to short season seed - if any was available - or gamble with what they’d pre-ordered during the winter.
Some switched and could win, others gambled and could loose big time. Others didn’t - or couldn’t - plant at all. For those pockets, the season is already an unredeemable washout.
A lot of it has to do with soil densities, with the more porous, sandy soils drying out relatively quickly permitting easier access with equipment, and the heavier clays retaining the water and turning into wheel-grabbing gumbo at the mere mention of machinery. Then there’s the related problem of compacting wet soil by running machines over it, preventing plant roots from developing properly.
Dips in the topography have collected water, making those sections more suitable for frogging than farming. And whither the nitrogen content? Many observers such as OMAFRA’s Gilles Quesnel suspect all that water may have washed much of it away, with potential disastrous effects on the plants that count on it unless they get a sudden re-injection.
In other words, it’s been one big mess. On the tiny up side, some crops have basked in all the cool, wet weather; hay, for example, has been thriving but, almost mockingly, farmers haven’t been able to get out there and get it at its peak. And seedlings planted in forest restoration work all over Eastern Ontario have just lapped up the moisture.
But the bread-and-butter crops around here - corn and soybeans - have been struggling, looking listless and stunted. An optimistic Quesnel says, given enough heat units, there’s still potential to salvage a crop, not bin-busting mind you, but at least something to show for the effort.
And at deadline for this edition of The AgriNews it looked like we were finally putting together some consecutive days of sun and its nurturing heat, that missing ingredient, what the crops can’t do without as they tread water towards maturity.
As Quesnel says, Eastern Ontario has been there before and has always rebounded.
The Good Lord and AGRICORP willing, we’ll do it again.
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From the Archives:
Op / Ed, July 2000
