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A farmer north of Edmonton considers himself lucky to have survived this harvest season. That's no joke about poor weather conditions and long hours in the combine. The evening of Sept. 26, Andy Shwetz in Waskatenau was heavy harrowing (breaking up and spreading straw on a combined field) on a quarter of land that contains a former town water well.
For Avtar Dhillon, living in the Sumas Prairie in Abbotsford meant cultivating his dream to farm the world's most expensive spice in British Columbia. Now his crop of about 250,000 saffron bulbs lies still under several feet of muddied water. The farmer, who recently said he was B.C.'s first to farm saffron on a large commercial scale, says his farm has suffered catastrophic damage due to flooding in the Fraser Valley. "I'm very upset about [the] saffron ... I take six years to get to this point ... and then Monday just lost everything." For Dhillon, who is also a blueberry farmer, it took several years of experimenting with different methods of growing saffron before finding one that worked.
A Manitoba drought that continues to plunge producers into a financial crisis, and it doesn't appear to be going away soon. The Dairy Farmers of Canada surveyed Manitoba producers this week, and 60 per cent said they won't or are unsure they will have enough feed to get through winter. "Some of the comments that were being made, you could sense the desperation," said David Wiens, vice-president of the organization and a dairy farmer with 200 cows near Grunthal, Man.
