Hursh Consulting & Communications Inc.

Despite all the emphasis on climate change, it isn’t at all clear what it will mean for Prairie agriculture.

Yes, the frost free period appears to be increasing in many parts of the Prairies, but there’s huge variability. According to Paul Bullock, a soil scientist at the University of Manitoba, the frost free period can vary by a month from one year to the next.

Bullock gave a presentation at the recent Prairie Grain Development Committee meeting in Winnipeg. PGDC is where new lines of many types of crops are assessed for whether they will be supported for registration. Like farmers, plant breeders would love to know the implications of climate change.

I was especially interested in hearing Bullock’s presentation because we were ag college classmates. With his farm background and continuing ties to a farm in northwestern Saskatchewan, he has a practicality often lacking by those trying to make sense of climate change and agriculture.

But Bullock isn’t a climate change denier by any means. He believes the extensive global measurements showing 2016 was the warmest year on record. In fact, most of the warmest years have been in the last decade.

He says southern Canada has seen a one to two degree temperature rise over the last 100 years. The change is most notable in higher minimum temperatures and since 1950 the main effect has been in the winter.

But when it comes to characterizing the weather tendencies for growing crops in Western Canada, the picture is not at all clear.

Since Canadian agriculture is at the northern extreme of crop production with a short frost free period and limited heat unit accumulation, a warming climate might mean we can grow bigger crops and a wider range of crops including soybeans and corn.

Bullock’s work and the work of other scientists shows any increase in frost free period is spatially inconsistent, meaning it’s longer at some reporting locations and actually shorter at others. Crop heat units have increased only sporadically and some have actually decreased. Overall, there is actually little change over the past 10 years.

What about precipitation? Bullock says this isn’t monitored well and it’s even tougher to draw conclusions.

In general, there has been an increase in spring rain. While snowfall is difficult to measure accurately, it has gone down.

Following the widespread Prairie drought in 2002, many big projects geared up to research drought. By the time those projects were up and running in 2005, the wet years had started. Bullock remembers 2011 in Manitoba when there were a record number of unseeded acres due to flooding and this was followed by a lack of rain that hurt the crops which had been seeded.

Will increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere actually aid plant growth? More uncertainty. And then there are the indirect effects of changing weed, disease and insect pressure. It’s reasonable to expect a broader range of pests.

An increase in severe weather seems likely. More global heat should mean more low-level moisture and the greater potential for storm energy.

In the end, even someone with Paul Bullock’s credentials can’t provide much practical guidance for farmers and plant breeders. The potential exists for increased floods as well as droughts in addition to more severe weather.

“Can we push coping mechanisms wider?” asks Bullock. Increasing crop production resilience to weather extremes may sound like a strategy, but it won’t be easy to accomplish.

It doesn’t really even have a name yet. Next Policy Framework or NPF is just a temporary moniker. The previous five-year program frameworks for agriculture were Growing Forward 1 and then Growing Forward 2. The new Liberal government has resisted the urge to refer to the next federal-provincial deal as Growing Forward 3, so at some point a new handle will be coined.

To their credit, governments started work on the NPF long before the expiration of Growing Forward 2. The wheels of government move very slowly, but there seems to be a concerted effort to have programs in place and move from one framework to another without big gaps.

At this point it’s difficult to know what changes will be in store when the NPF begins in April of 2018, but a few clues are emerging. Much of the work revolves around funding for agricultural research, but farmers will be watching for the programs that affect them more directly.

Whether you think it’s noble or misguided, we have a federal government committed to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. That will have an impact on agriculture both within and outside of the NPF.

Within the NPF, don’t be surprised to see a renewed emphasis on Environmental Farm Plans. Most Prairie farmers who went through the Environmental Farm Plan process many years ago were motivated by government support for Best Management Practices (BMPs).

Attend a workshop for a couple of days, fill in the blanks on the forms and presto. You could get government cost sharing for narrow openers on your seed drill and/or a GPS guidance system.

The Environmental Farm Plan was not a living document. The thick binders have collected thick layers of dust. While there’s still funding for a few BMPs, very few producers have updated their plans.

In the NPF, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a resurrection of the Environmental Farm Plan approach with a much greater emphasis on emission reductions.

Outside of the NPF, biofuel policy will have a great impact on agriculture and at this point there are mixed expectations of how the federal government will proceed. Some are hopeful that ethanol and biodiesel will be viewed as part of the solution to reducing carbon emissions thereby increasing the biofuel demand for corn, wheat and canola.

Others say a full lifecycle assessment shows ethanol and biodiesel as poor choices for overall emission reduction. If the government adopts that view, expect new demand to be minimal.

What happens south of the border might be even more important. Donald Trump appears to be an ethanol supporter, although at this point everyone is still trying to guess what approach he will take on a large number of issues.

The lion’s share of funding for the NPF will likely remain Business Risk Management – in other words the farm safety net programs of AgriInvest, AgriStability and AgriInsurance.

Will government contributions under AgriInvest remain at 1.0 per cent of eligible net sales? Will there be some sort of tax abatement to encourage producers to withdraw the money as long as it’s used for specific types of on-farm investments?

And what’s the fate of AgriStability? Enrollment continues to drop and its shortcomings have been widely discussed. Can it be fixed or should it be replaced and if so, with what?

If you have views, let both levels of government know. Whatever the NPF is ultimately named, five years is a long time to harbor regrets.

It might have been the end of the line for the old tractor. Instead, with advice from near and far and a single flat washer, the tractor has a shot at another seeding season.

The problem was evident as soon as we hooked to the new-to-us seed drill. The drill lifted just fine, but it wouldn’t fold. The hydraulics on the 875 Versatile built in 1980 didn’t have enough lift for the wings of a K-Hart drill from 2012.

Another tractor was used to fold the wings and we pulled the drill home to ponder the problem.

As I talked with the guys on coffee row, I learned that you could easily measure hydraulic pressure with a gauge inserted in the tractor coupling. A neighbour lent us a gauge and we soon found the tractor was putting out only 2000 psi.

The instruction book says the tractor is rated at 2300 psi, so what was the problem – filter issues or maybe a weak hydraulic pump? I posed the question on Twitter and suggestions came pouring back.

One response suggested the solution was to buy a new tractor for $600,000. Another said that new hydraulic pumps are about $10,000 installed. Yet another said that he didn’t think hydraulic gear pumps were still available for such an old Versatile.

Well, maybe it was just a filter issue. No probably not said another Tweet. A filter restriction would reduce the flow, but in most cases it shouldn’t reduce the pressure.

As you can probably tell by now, equipment repair is not my strong suit. A mechanic I am not.

But a young mechanic called my cell phone. He had seen my Tweet and had fixed a hydraulic pressure issue on our Apache sprayer. The tractor is probably twice as old as this mechanic, but he went back and forth with us trying to locate a pressure relief valve. He even talked about using shims in the valve to boost the pressure.

No valve on or around the hydraulic pump. Despite what the instruction book says, no relief valve at the front of the oil reservoir. The neighbour who lent us the pressure gauge used to run a similar old Versatile and he remembered a relief valve on the hydraulic spools behind the cab.

We had removed a panel and closely examined this cluster, even getting schematics emailed from a couple of dealerships. The schematics were a different orientation and with all the parts fitting into other parts, the diagram wasn’t that useful. And it didn’t really list anything described as a pressure relief valve. We unscrewed some big plugs, but no relief value.

We pondered the problem with our neighbour and he suggested the valve might be located between the spools and the back of the cab. We might be able to get to it by removing another panel.

He was right. When we got it out, we discovered “2300” stamped on the end. We took the valve apart and added a couple of small washers on top of the spring. That shot the pressure up to 3000 psi. Impressive, but way above system specifications.

We went with just one flat washer, about the size of a dime, giving us 2500 psi and just enough pressure to fold the drill. An amazingly simple and cheap fix, but we’d have never figured it out without neighbours, both close-by and on Twitter.

Sometimes a market goes bonkers and that’s what has happened with lentils. Whenever craziness ensues, there are inevitably negative consequences and it will be no different with this bit of insanity.

Sky-high record price levels are certainly a good news story for producers lucky enough to sell into this rapidly rising market, but observers are actively speculating on the potential downside in the months and years ahead.

First, for areas where lentils are not normally part of the crop rotation, let’s recap price performance. Red lentils were a good price at harvest time, selling off the combine for around 35 cents a pound. Now, they are 55 or more. That 20 cent a pound price increase is an extra $12 a bushel.

Top quality large green lentils were selling for around 40 cents a pound off the combine. Now some buyers are reportedly paying 70 cents, an $18 a bushel increase in about four months.

If you grew a really good crop of lentils and had the foresight/luck to hold them until recently you could have grossed $1,000 or maybe even $1,500 an acre.

Of course, very few will have reached those lofty returns. Stories abound of could have, should have, would have, from producers who wish they could have grown a bigger crop and wouldn’t have sold it so soon.

Analysts attribute most of the price strength to dry conditions in India which have stoked the demand for lentil imports. A chunk of the price strength also comes from the weakening Canadian dollar.

New crop contract prices were available in the early fall, months ahead of the normal time and those prices have also ratcheted up to record levels. Prices of 40 cents a pound on the first 10 bushels per acre have been available with an act of God clause in the contract.

This makes lentils the stand-out winner in 2016 cropping options. Some producers who have never grown lentils want to try their luck and price contracts are being signed with farms in such unlikely locations as Prince Albert and Winnipeg.

Lately, new crop red lentil prices have retraced a bit. Some buyers have withdrawn from the market. They’ve filled their contracting needs even before the time when new crop contracts are usually just being initiated.

This overheated market will produce winners as well as losers.

There’s a reason why lentils aren’t grown in higher moisture regions. If those regions have drier and warmer weather than normal in 2016, they might grow a decent crop. Otherwise, there could be huge crop failures.

In areas where lentils are normally grown, many producers will be pushing their rotation to seed as many as possible and that could result in disease issues. In some cases, producers are rolling the dice and seeding their entire farm to lentils.

If you don’t have a contract, will you be able to sell 2016 lentils and what will the price be if acreage and production is as high as anticipated? Producers in many other locations around the world are also excited to cash in, so international competition will likely increase.

What will happen with negotiated sales with buyers in far-away countries when the price inevitably falls? Lentils marketers would seem to be facing a lot of risk.

Analysts say the cure for high prices is high prices. Overproduction typically leads to a number of years of depressed returns.

Lentils are hot and that probably means someone is going to get burned.

You can question the pasteurization of milk, express concern over the safety of common disease vaccinations and doubt the safety of GM foods and incur fewer wraths than if you challenge the holy grail of climate change.

For the record, I side with science on pasteurization, vaccination and biotechnology, but climate change science isn’t in the same league.

Sure the climate is changing. Always has. Yes, human activities are probably having an impact. There are a lot of us. But every weather event now ends up being linked to climate change and somebody uses it to promote their anti-development agenda.

It was dry over much of Western Canada this summer – forest fires, shriveled crops – just the sort of ammunition the anti-development crowd loves. “We can expect more of this as the climate continues to change,” they love to say.

Lots of factors go into a heavy forest fire season and in the agricultural area we’ve seen droughts of far bigger scale and longevity. The heavy rain that recently hit much of Saskatchewan and parts of Manitoba was unusual for the end of July, but it wasn’t epic.

If the climate is really going to hell in a handbasket shouldn’t world food production be declining? To date, better production technology and farming practices have more than counterbalanced any perceived climate effects.

The experts have trouble predicting the weather two weeks from now. A seasonal forecast is little better than a coin toss. Will 2016 be another drier than normal year over much of the Prairies? No one really knows, but whatever happens you can be sure it will be attributed to climate change.

Is the long term climate trend hotter and drier, or hotter and wetter, or perhaps hotter with more variability in precipitation? Climate change advocates love that last one. Rather than tying themselves to a trend, they can point to any climate deviation as proof positive.

Climate change hysteria is being used as a club to beat the fossil fuel industry into submission. Oil shouldn’t be extracted from the ground. It shouldn’t be moved by pipelines. It shouldn’t be sold to other countries. It’s ruining the climate, don’t you know?

For the sake of the planet, Canada should do the right thing and withdraw from oil production even if that cripples the economy. Just because oil from other countries would fill the void with little or no net effect on emissions is seldom mentioned.

A surprising number of people are happy every time big, bad oil is vilified, but very few people want to make any personal sacrifice.

Reducing fossil fuel consumption is a worthy objective worldwide and as Canadians we should do our part. That doesn’t mean shutting down the industry; it means reducing personal consumption.

One of the best policy tools would be a carbon tax. We can debate the size of the tax and how it should be applied, but if you really want to curb fossil fuel use, put a tax on it and dedicate the money collected to developing renewable options.

The idea is about as popular as a skunk at a summer barbeque. People want big oil to be sacrificed on the climate change altar. They don’t want to make any sacrifice themselves.

During the upcoming federal election campaign, expect all of the political parties to give lip service to addressing climate change. Don’t expect any of them to be brave enough to advocate a carbon tax.