Arid summer means farmers in southern Saskatchewan face a desperate situation

[inanna]

REGINA — The Canadian Press
Published Sunday, Aug. 06, 2017 5:50PM EDT

The ground is so dry and deeply cracked on Todd Lewis’s farm in southern Saskatchewan that he says if a wrench is dropped down one of the crevasses, “we’ll never find it.”

“If you dropped a rod down there that was eight or nine feet long, you wouldn’t hit the bottom of that crack,” Mr. Lewis told The Canadian Press. “It would disappear.”

Mr. Lewis, who is also president of the Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan, farms near Gray, south of Regina, and the region has been extremely dry.

Environment Canada figures show Regina had only 1.8 millimetres of rain last month – the driest July in 130 years. It was the driest July ever recorded in the city of Moose Jaw, about 70 kilometres west of Regina. Moose Jaw got 4.3 mm of rain in July, less than the 4.6 mm it got in 1929.

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https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/arid-summer-means-farmers-in-southern-saskatchewan-face-a-desperate-situation/article35890728/

So..."dust bowl" conditions on the prairies? I sincerely hope we do not see a repeat of that.

[doc03]

1. If I could I would send them all the dam rain we have had this

summer in Ohio.

[Warpy]

2. Farming techniques have changed enough

that I doubt we'd see another Dust Bowl, not to the extent it was seen in the 1930s. Still, the center part of the country was never meant to be plowed up, it was always at its best as grassland that went on forever. A lot of the US prairie is living on borrowed time that's about to run out, the Ogalalla aquifer is not going to last forever.

And yes, the 1930s drought did extend across the southern Canadian prairies as well as the western US