I got back last night at midnight from the farm in Saskatchewan – another harvest in the books for another year.
I wish I could relate some analogy of harvest to marketing – but I am coming up short – but I can relate it to business in general. That would be – work hard and it gets done – and good things happen.
Harvest this year was a mixed bag. Â Crops looked really good all year. Â With excellent moisture conditions we put extra fertilizer on and changed up our rotation a bit to do almost all Canola. With record high prices going in to fall and an excellent stand – things were looking like this would be a year for the record books.
I would like to mention that I feel for all the farmers down in Eastern Canada and the states – fighting through one of the worst droughts ever. Â I vividly remember the late 80’s when conditions in SK were terribly dry – and that is no picnic.
But the drought has had the impact of increasing the prices for the crop that does get to the bin. Â That is different than the 80’s when the drought had little or no impact on the price. Â Some of the worst prices in years were during the driest years.
Back to this year – swathing the canola crop was challenging as throughout the year heavy rains and even heavier winds had turned a heavy stand into a tangled mess that was laying down close to the ground.  Therefore this necessitated swathing close to the ground.
After swathing the rows looked pretty sweat.
I headed back to AB for a week and a half to let things dry down to be ready for harvesting – looking forward to some awesome combining.
Unfortunately – those nasty winds came back with a vengeance!
When I headed back to Saskatchewan, the lovely looking swaths were now in dis-array – scattered all across the fields. Â In places there was almost nothing to be found. Â In others we needed to run the combine over every inch between the swaths.
I estimated that approximately 40% of the crop was blown away by the wind.
The good thing was that the stand was very heavy to start with, so in the end we still had a reasonable yield. Â No record books, but with the prices as high as they are, will pay the bills and have a little left over for the next rainy (or dry, or windy) day.
