For the week of July 22nd – 29th
This year the weather seems to be a continuance of existing weather patterns. Once the pattern sets in, it doesn’t want to change. We had a cool / wet pattern evolve in May and June into early July and it just seemed to stick. Through the remainder of July and now looking into the early part of August – the trend is HOT and DRY weather. While we were eagerly waiting for heat and dry weather in May and June – but just couldn’t get a break — now in July/August we are eagerly waiting for some moisture and a break from the heat! Once we get in a cycle it just doesn’t want to break.
So, what does this mean for our production potential? Well, so far the cereals do seem to be holding up. You can start to see areas in the field that are prematurely turning color due to lack of moisture, more so in our fields down south. Canola is the crop that seems to have been suffering the most. From the road the crop potential looks good, but once you go into the field you can see that even though the plants are tall, there is a lack of podding depth. Some of it only flowered for 2 1/2 to 3 weeks — normally you would be expecting a flowering period of 3 to 4 weeks – the heat seems to have been the primary reason the flowering period was cut short. What will this mean to final canola yields? The earlier planted canola started flowering prior to the extreme heat and likely has less damage – the later seeded not only had to contend with the heat, but also the lack of moisture. Canola is a hard crop to predict yield…biomass doesn’t always correlate with yield.
The soil moisture probes tell the story – you can see below the last major rain event was at the end of June and there really hasn’t been much for measurable moisture since then. Fortunately the subsoil was near capacity in the north and while not “full” in the south, it was at a positive level. The soil moisture probes are 1 meter in depth, and have sensors at the 10cm, 20cm, 30cm, 50cm, 70cm and 100cm depths. Each line on the graph represents a sensor on the probe at one of those depths. When you see a “spike” higher, that is a rain event. The number of sensors that it impacts gives you and indication of how much rain there was and the depth the moisture was able to get to. If the “spike” higher impacts all the way to the 100cm depth, that is a good indication that subsoil moisture levels are high. The color bar at the far right side is a visual indicator of the moisture at each level. Red is dry and blue is wet – from top to bottom.
As the roots tap into each soil depth, you can see the line start to “squiggle” like a heart monitor would. That is a sign the roots are accessing the moisture at that depth. Interestingly, even though moisture was abundant up until the end of July — the roots do seem to be accessing levels below 70cm, which is a positive sign. The concern with abundant moisture early on can lead to a shallow rooted plant – as it doesn’t feel the need to have to grow “downwards” to access moisture, as it is readily available at shallow depths. Seeing that they are accessing moisture below 70cm is a good sign – and that is why the plants seem to be weathering the heat and dry conditions.
The weather does seem to be showing signs of a change — this next week still looks to be hot and dry, but cool weather is forecast for the following week with at least a chance of some precipitation, although not a significant amount, at least there is potential for something.