Caleb Nickerson
PONTIAC July 19, 2017
Pontiac is known as a region with a strong agricultural sector but this year’s weather has been anything but hospitable to local farmers. Heavy rain, flooding and below average temperatures have made a mess of fields and forced schedules back by weeks. The Equity caught up with several farmers from across the region to see how they were dealing with the curveball that Mother Nature has thrown them.

Ralph Lang of RM Lang Farms grows corn, soybeans and wheat on 2,800 acres stretching from Luskville to Clarendon. He said he was lucky that the majority of their fields have tile drainage; otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to plant nearly as much as they did.
“[Planting] was late and slow. It took us two months to plant … where it usually takes 15 -20 days to plant so it was an extra 30, 40 days,” he said. “We probably got 90 per cent of ours all planted but if it wasn’t tiled ground it would have been a lot lower. We started early and bought a bigger planter to get more acres in faster.”
He said he’s never seen a season with so much rain, adding that they’ve had to use more fertilizer to replace what has been washed away by the incessant drizzle.
“We’re having trouble getting our spraying done and our nitrogen on,” he said. “We lost a lot of nitrogen this year. A lot of it washed away so we had to sample and put on nitrogen that we lost.”
He was cautiously optimistic about what the adverse weather would mean come the fall.
“I think it will be down a little bit but as long as we get the heat in July and August we should be okay for whatever got planted,” he said. “80 per cent of it should be decent, but 20 per cent will be not very good or no good. The average will be down but if we get some heat it should be alright.”
Jared Hamilton is one of the owners of Moutainview Turf outside Quyon, which cultivates around 500 acres of sod. Since they plant in the fall, their planting schedule wasn’t interrupted, but the damp spring made maintaining their crop a challenge.
“A third of our acreage is new seeding and it takes two years for it to grow,” he explained. “Now typically we mow our fields about twice a week. For all of our new seeding – that’s fields that we sowed last fall – because of how saturated the fields are, we’ve only been able to mow them twice this year.”
He said that mowing encourages root growth but he was unsure of the extent to which the final product would be impacted.
“Everything looks okay, but until we see what the roots are like we won’t know how it’s been affected,” he said.
He said they’ve been harvesting almost exclusively in one of their fields with sandy soil, which is typically very dry.
“There’s one field in particular where we’re harvesting in right now. It’s beach sand and it’s so dry that instead of taking two years to grow it takes us three years,” he said. “It’s the only field we have right now that we can harvest in. Not only that, right now it’s the first time in my father’s life that he’s seen water laying in that field.”
He added that they’ve had to increase the amount of nitrogen they spray on the field in an attempt to counteract the dampness. In addition to all the problems growing and harvesting, Hamilton added that selling their product has also been a challenge this year.
“Nobody can move on any construction jobs,” he said. “Let’s say you’re working in a job where you have to put down topsoil, then sod. It takes two or three days for the job site to dry up and the way it’s been going, every third or fourth day it’s been rain.”
“It’s been interesting,” he said with a chuckle.
David Gillespie raises a flock of 100 sheep at his farm on Allumette Island but also harvests hay and some grain. He said that none of the farmers with larger acreages that he knows finished their planting.
“I didn’t need to plant anything this year. I planted fall rye, so I’m good,” he said. “I’m fine but had I needed to plant this year, I wouldn’t have made it.”
He said timing is everything when it comes to making hay, as you need a window of several dry days in order to get a quality product. He said that the adverse weather has forced some farmers to try and harvest fields that haven’t completely dried out.
“I saw somebody that did try. Huge, deep mud tracks from the tractor,” he said. “That’s horrible. It’s not worth doing hay in those conditions because your hay’s going to be crap. It’s going to be mixed with mud and water and you ruin your fields with your tractor.”
He said that high quality roughage is key to raising livestock.
“Most [farmers] are going to have poor quality [hay] unless they mix it with some from last year,” he said. “It’s not good if you have poor quality hay, no matter what kind of animal you have.”
Gillespie tracks the weather closely and said that in recent years, there has been a tendency towards extreme weather. He compared this year’s soggy spring to the drought that he experienced last year.
“The effects are always devastating no matter what extreme you’re on,” he said, adding that as a farmer he just has to persevere. “I can’t change the weather, all I can do is adapt.”