Past trends, future projections can’t account for everything

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/06/2024 (501 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Call it the farm writers’ version of a rain dance. We had no sooner set up a newsroom team to plan how we would cover the western Canadian drought this spring and it started to rain.

As of this week, the only weather station in the provincial network that was showing below normal precipitation was Moosehorn at 87 per cent. Most of the province is registering well above, with a half-dozen sites — including the one near where I live — marking more than 200 per cent of normal. That same station a year ago was at 18 per cent of normal precipitation, with much of the province registering well below 50 per cent.

The unsettled weather and the showers have continued, pushing seeding behind, disrupting weed-spraying operations, bolstering pasture growth while simultaneously wreaking havoc with efforts to get the hay crop harvested in good condition.

The story is much the same across the Prairies.

It’s been cooler so far this year too, with growing degree days (a measure of how much heat crops are getting) at 20 to 30 per cent below the norm. Last year, they were 30 to 40 per cent above.

The adage that “rain makes grain” still holds true. Cooler temperatures slow growth a little, but they lessen the likelihood of heat stress on crops such as canola at the critical flowering stage.

The biggest threats emerging for crop development this year are saturated roots and diseases that thrive in moist conditions. Diseases such as fusarium head blight, which can render grain unusable because of the mycotoxins produced, are poised to make a comeback after a hiatus through several dry years.

It’s lucky timing for the release this year of a new fusarium risk monitoring tool built by researchers at the University of Manitoba with support from several commodity groups and federal and provincial governments.

The tool provides daily, localized risk predictions based on weather station data and algorithms built from collecting field data on fusarium development in hundreds of plots over three years.

The near real-time guidance on whether they should protect their crop with fungicides will be invaluable in years when fusarium is a threat. In the past, farmers were left guessing; either apply fungicides as insurance or wait until they knew they had a problem and potentially be too late to spare their crop.

Tools that help farmers track in- season threats from disease, insects and weeds are destined to play an increasingly important role helping farmers manage their risk. Yet had this tool been released last year, it may not have seen much uptake, which if anything, underscores that farmers need options from policies and technologies, not solutions.

No one predicted when or how dramatic this moisture turnaround would be, or what threats might emerge as a result. Farmers could not have planned for it.

Researchers have been able to track historical changes in Prairie climatic conditions, such as a lengthening growing season, warmer winters, and more precipitation — on average. The forward-looking models also offer insights as to the impact of changing climate conditions on a crop’s ability to use available nutrients and the crop’s nutrient density itself, how efficiently it uses water and whether new diseases or pests will emerge to threaten it.

However, those patterns and trends don’t change the day-to-day reality for farmers.

A longer growing season means nothing if a freak frost hits in June, as happened in Saskatchewan a week or so ago. Or if the timing of showers limits farmers’ ability to carry out field work in the compressed windows they operate within for seeding, spraying or harvesting.

A drought-resistant variety doesn’t help them much if there is no drought.

It helps explain why many farmers get a mite testy over the suggestion that agriculture needs to play a larger role in climate change mitigation while simultaneously learning how to “adapt.”

History buffs can track what happened over time. The modellers can predict what might be. But farmers must deal with what is, just as they always have.

Laura Rance is executive editor, production content lead for Glacier FarmMedia. She can be reached at lrance@farmmedia.com