Another Storm…Swathing Started

**This is as of Wednesday August 24th ** Late post

Another week gone by and yet another storm! It seems like we are in a pattern that is being stubborn and just won’t change. On Monday late afternoon we moved our swathers down to the earlier seeded Legacy 6-row barley and started to swath. The forecast was 10% chance of showers, and at 6pm we had the first of two storms hit. The first storm was brief but heavy, and we ended up with about 20mm across the south, nothing on our central land, and 20mm on some of our north land, with nothing in the far north. Then, around midnight, a second storm set in and we ended up with significant rain down south, and moderate amounts elsewhere. In total we had between 50-100mm down south, 5-10mm in central areas, and 30mm on most of the north except the far north which again missed it completely.

We are fortunate that all we ended up with was heavy rain, as the storm continued to the east there are reports of siginificant hail. Besides the rain, we had strong winds, which again lodged the crop even more. What was our driest area all season is now the wettest, with standing water in most low areas. As dry as it was, we are hoping most of the standing water will soak in prior to most of our harvesting operations down south.

We will have to swath all our barley this year – its lodged too badly and it won’t dry down soon enough to wait for straight combining. On Monday we had started the first field, and then got rained out after only a few hours. We were able to resume swathing operations again on Tuesday and hope to be able to try combining on Friday, before the next round of showers which is forecast for Saturday.

We also started preharvesting our canola down south. Outside of last year, which was a drought reduced crop, this will be the first real year for straight combining canola for our farm. We are spraying with glyphosate to kill the crop and weeds – so they dry down and make it easier to put through the combine. The canola crop is lighter down south from the drier summer we had in that area – versus up north where it will be a while yet before the crop is mature enough for us to preharvest.

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