Canada: Drought conditions not letting up

Moisture is just as much of a concern as harvest wraps up across the Prairies as it was at the beginning of the growing season.

As of Sept. 30, 72 percent of Canada was reported as having some level of drought conditions, 69 percent of which is agricultural land, according to Agriculture Canada’s recently released Canadian Drought Monitor report.

The department defines drought as a “ ‘creeping phenomenon’ — difficult to define and measure, slow to develop, continuous, cumulative and long lasting. There is no universally applicable tool for measuring drought, as impacts are non-structural, spread over large areas and best described by multiple indices.”

The monitor map, which was prepared by Agriculture Canada’s National Agroclimate Information Service, says conditions range from normally dry (D0) to exceptional drought (D4) conditions.

Farmers can easily recover from D1 and D2 conditions, said Trevor Hadwen, an agroclimate specialist with Agriculture Canada, so the areas of concern are more the D3 and D4 regions.

Looking at the Prairies, 83 percent of land is reporting some level of drought but nearly 20 percent face the more worrying conditions of extreme and exceptional drought.

“That’s a fairly scary number going into the winter,” said Hadwen.

“My bigger concern is how do we recover from that because we’re not growing crops through the winter period, so we do have a little bit of a hiatus here.”

While precipitation wasn’t great this year, it shouldn’t have caused those severe D3 and D4 conditions. It’s the multiple years of drought that have created conditions that are difficult to bounce back from, especially one dry year after another.

“We’ve had deficits for multiple years in a row, and we’re seeing some relief on an ad hoc basis in at least the western Prairies this past year. We’ve got a little bit of rain here and there, but again, those deficits were so big that we can’t improve the drought situation.”

Manitoba is its own “mystery,” said Hadwen.

While many farmers are seeing D3 conditions with very little precipitation during the year, the impacts haven’t been as severe, he said. The province received some relief from the heat and better soil moisture conditions going into the growing season.

“Manitoba, the crop was good compared to what the precipitation should have led us to believe,” Hadwen said.

“Pastures are a little bit iffy in Manitoba, whereas crops and pastures are poor in Alberta and western regions of Saskatchewan.”

Alberta’s northeastern and northwestern growing regions are not experiencing any drought. They represent a large portion of the 17 percent of the Prairies that have sufficient moisture.

Northern Alberta started the growing season with a dry spring but then received a lot of rain, which resulted in flooding in the Peace, Hinton and Jasper areas.

“The impacts that we track through our Agroclimate Impact Reporter have shown that the producers in that area actually had really good crops and did quite well and no significant soil moisture issues whatsoever,” Hadwen said.

Conditions in much of the Prairies are even more of a concern with an El Nino winter on the horizon, he said.

Less snow and warmer temperatures, typical of an El Nino, would mean less moisture. Exposed soils are also susceptible to evaporation and more moisture leaching out of the soil.

However, El Nino might have a silver lining for farmers come spring, said Hadwen.

“We might get more storms in the spring. The jet streams during El Nino years seem to be a little bit more organized, so we tend to get those more organized storm systems that come through that we haven’t had in the last couple of years.”

Tags: harvest, Canada, Manitoba, soil moisture, Prairies, Эль-Ниньо, drought conditions