Photo from the Alberta Canola Facebook page.

By Curtis Galbraith

Agriculture

Peace Country farmers combining and seeding

May 4, 2020 | 5:30 AM

The warmer, windy weather means Peace Country farmers have been able to get back to combining the crop that stayed in the field all winter.

County of Grande Prairie Ag. Fieldman Sonja Raven says areas of the west part of the County were the first to get going, but work is underway in other parts as well.

We asked her about the quality of what is being harvested.

“Having been through a winter that we had; we’re looking at definite downgrading. I think that a lot of them are speculating that (it will be) feed quality for the cereals. For the canola, of course, you’re always getting into trouble with rodent activity through the winter.”

Raven says cleaning that seed will mean an added cost for producers. She adds not too many people have had to use grain dryers.

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“I only talked to a couple of guys who had been taking grain off and they said it’s actually not too bad. They were drying a lot more in the fall. The one guy was telling me that the grain was drying definitely faster than his canola. You get on the bottom of the swath with the canola and it was still pretty wet.”

Raven says the wind, has helped dry fields out quickly, with the not so positive part of that weather being flooding and the harm it has done.

Farm commodity groups in Alberta say $1-billion worth of crop across Alberta went unharvested last fall and stayed in the field all winter.

Raven says seeding is going ahead on what she describes as a field-by-field basis.

“I’ve got one guy he says ‘I’ll seed 60 acres of the one (field) and the rest isn’t ready so I’ll have to come back’ and he said ‘It’s not the way I prefer to do it.’ But he said if that’s what it takes to get it done, then that’s what it takes.”

Raven says it looks like most producers are sticking with the seeding plans they had made to match up with their planned rotations.