The average temperature for the month was 9.1 degrees compared to 9.5 last year, the ten year normal of 9.4 and the fifty year average of 8.6. The persistent rainfall was above normal with 107 mms. or 4.2 inches falling on 19 of the available 31 days leaving few days to do any drying.
This amount of precipitation would not cause a problem usually but it followed 43 mms. or 1.7 inches in the last three days of September. The combination, within 34 days, caused the tile drains to begin to run and the field surfaces to become quite soft and muddy. Rainfall for the summer was highly variable within a few miles.
I reported earlier that the Ormstown station had only 91 mms. between April 14 and July 10, a period during which all crops were desperate for water and now the station has 107 mms. in one month only. Obviously, we can’t order the exact weather we would like to have since there would never be agreement and we would be blaming each other instead of “mother nature”. Some things must be left to a higher power and we must make the best of it.
Soybeans seemed to make the best of the weather swings producing reported yields of between 1.5 to 1.8 tonnes per acre. Grain corn, on the other hand, was more affected by the extremes with some areas, which received timely rain, producing around five tonne per acre while those most affected by drought, which included mine, produced a more disappointing four tonnes. It could have been much worse if the rain had not begun on July 11 before pollination.
On the other hand, four tonnes is twice what we used to produce fifty years ago. During the fifty years, I have never seen a situation like this year at harvest time when the corn was so short that I could look over the top of the canopy while sitting on my small, old tractors. Pasture and forage
crops, which had been in short supply during the dry summer, have ended with a normal year due to the abundant late summer and fall rain.
Peter Finlayson
