By Kirsten Leatherdale, of The Weyburn Review
| By Kirsten Leatherdale It's a warm and sunny Saturday afternoon at the Weyburn Inland Terminal, and large trucks hauling newly-harvested grain are lining up as farmers make their way to the grading station to get the verdict on their crop. Cedoux farmer Ed Gall waits as the grain buyer inspects his sample. It's not the news he wants to hear - his spring wheat has graded No. 3. But it could've been worse. "After the rain, (the crop) did everything it wasn't supposed to do. If the price was anything, a man could make a decent living - but not this way," Gall says. A week's worth of foggy, humid and wet weather early in September is now showing up in the form of sprouting and mildew in much of the wheat, durum and barley that has been harvested in the southeast corner of the province. Whether standing or lying in swaths, not much of the grain escaped the harmful conditions. "Most (farmers) right now, after the rains, accept the fact that it's going to be a poor grade," says grain buyer Bill Hauton, who has been the bearer of bad news to several producers over the past few days. "We've been seeing lots of No. 5 durum. It's just poor. A lot of them are trying to save the farm this year, and this isn't going to do it," he said. Asked to give an example of an average grade prior to the poor weather, Hauton points to a line on WIT's price list for No. 2 Amber Durum, at $2.75 per bushel, after deductions. Then he moves his pencil down the list to reflect what many farmers are bringing in now - No. 5 Amber Durum, which pays out just $1.32 per bushel. Weyburn's extension agrologist Elaine Moats says the affected area is quite large, stretching west of Highway 6 to the Manitoba border. Although the seed coat protects grain from taking on moisture in many cases, the right combination of moisture and temperature will cause the chemical composition of the grain to change, resulting in germination. "It has an impact on the starch granules and the way they behave when made into baked goods and pasta," she explains. For barley, if the seeds are already sprouting they won't germinate uniformly for malting. "It will take a while to figure out the total effect of this. Some of these grains will go into the seed industry, but there are huge grain seed stocks in North America. It's really going to be a tough year for people who had their crop downgraded," says the agrologist. Over at the weighing station, operator Deanne Miller-Jones keeps the line moving at a brisk pace, as the farmers outside open the chutes on their trucks to dump their grain. "I hear a lot of devastation," she says. "The price sucks. If the price was better they'd be able to eat their problems better." Miller-Jones says she found some newspapers in her house from 1928, and was shocked to see the price of wheat and barley was very comparable to today's depressed values. The widespread downgrading of the crop in the area has only made things worse. "I called this fog the ultimate germination test. It was a very untimely and costly thing that happened," says Miller-Jones. Outside the weigh station Griffin farmer Trevor Dammann watches a load of barley he's hauled in for another farmer pour over the grates into the holding bin below. He agrees the success of this year's crop had a lot to do with timing. Dammann was one of the fortunate ones to get his barley off before it rained. It went malting. "The neighbours around me aren't so lucky - there's a lot of durum and barley that's sprouted," he says. "It's a question of timing. If we could've had two more weeks of decent weather we wouldn't have had to worry about the stuff that's being hauled in now." Dammann says the Weyburn area needed a good crop with decent returns this year, and it was shaping up that way with good yields. Now farmers are antsy to put this harvest behind them. "Guys are saying they can't wait until it's over. They'd like to get it done and over with." The harvest is around 70 per cent completed in the Weyburn area, and 74 per cent finished on average province-wide. The warm weather that arrived Saturday has remained and will likely last through next weekend. Saskatchewan Agriculture and Food estimates another three weeks are needed before harvest is done. |
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