Relatively dry winter a boon for farmers in southeast Sask.

New weather data from Environment Canada shows that some areas in southeast Saskatchewan were relatively dry due to a lack of snowfall in December, January and February.

For Jake Leguee, who farms about 15,000 acres near Fillmore, that’s exactly what he was hoping for after what he called an awful fall harvest season in 2019.

“We had about an entire growing season’s worth of rain during harvest, plus we already had a normal growing season’s worth of moisture before that,” he said. “That creates a lot of wet spots. You just can’t get going.”

Environment Canada’s data shows that Estevan and its surrounding area had the driest year on record (spanning 88 years) in terms of snowfall for the specified time period, with just 13.4 millimetres of snowfall precipitation. The average is 40.6 mm in that same time period.

Leguee, who lives about 100 kilometres north of Estevan, said it was a dry winter, but anything else would have made matters worse.

“(Even now in March) we’ve got a really, really full soil profile right now, so we’re quite happy to see a very dry winter,” he said.

Moose Jaw and its surrounding area had its second-driest winter on record, with 10.7 mm of snowfall precipitation. The average over 108 years is 44.4 mm, according to the data.

The weather agency said Regina and area had the third-driest winter months of its 129-year record. The area had 10.9 mm of snowfall precipitation when the average is 40.4 mm.

Thinking back to a wet 2019 fall, Leguee said: “We had about eight to 10 inches of rain plus snow throughout the months of August, September and October, which made for a miserable harvest.”

He was able to get most of his crop off the field before November. He hasn’t been able to get to what was left as of yet.

There’s nothing in the soil now to take up all the moisture that’s sitting there. The best-case scenario, he said, is for heavy snow and rain to hold off for the rest of March into April, making for a less stressful seeding season.

Even with that outcome, Leguee said he’ll have to repair more than the normal number of ruts on his land, thanks to the extra water covering it during the 2019 harvest season.

In a regular harvest season, he would have repaired them at the end of harvest and before the new year.

“It just creates a lot of extra jobs … Seeding has to be done perfectly; you only get one opportunity to put that crop in the ground. Taking our focus away to deal with some of these other things, we end up needing more people and more equipment,” he said.