Farmers feeling anxious as late snowfalls delay seeding: Shaun Haney

At this time of year, most Saskatchewan farmers would typically be out seeding their fields.

But with spring storms leaving fields in some area covered with snow, there’s plenty of concern about the season ahead in the province’s agricultural sector.

Read more:

• Snowfall expected to continue Friday and Saturday as spring storm hammers Saskatchewan
• Foam Lake students pitch in to fill sandbags as flooding hits the area
• Monette Group files for creditor protection

Shaun Haney, founder of RealAgriculture and host of Real Ag on the Weekend on 980 CJME and 650 CKOM, joined The Evan Bray Show on Friday to discuss the late start some farmers are getting, and a couple of other issues that are adding even more anxiety to the minds of many producers.

Listen to the full interview with Haney, or read the transcript below:

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

EVAN BRAY: I talked to a ton of farmers on the show every day, and two yesterday used the word “anxious.” They’re getting anxious about seeding. This snow blast that we’re getting again this weekend is pushing seeding back in many places an uncomfortable amount of time.

SHAUN HANEY: We’re getting to the back end of April, and as soon as that calendar flips next week to May, I think we’re going to see that level of anxiousness rise even more, especially if we see fields covered in white and we get the kind of snowfall that we’re expecting here. If you look at the northern part of Saskatchewan, there’s already a lot of snow. There is no ground to be seen. But I guess, to give some people some encouragement, when I talked to Matt Makens from Makens Weather back earlier in 2026, he said this is exactly what we should be cheering for. We should be cheering for a late spring, because it’s going to push the coming drought out of June and more into August. So, if Matt’s right, we may be thanking ourselves later this year for the fact that we did get a bit of a later start.

I think we have to acknowledge that there are still parts of the province that have been historically dry over the last number of years, even decade, who are, in some cases, already in the field seeding. So it’s not a province-wide trend, this moisture that we’re getting.

HANEY: Yeah, it’s kind of feast or famine, right? You either have it or you don’t, and that’s kind of the reality right now. It’s the same thing if you go to Alberta. It’s the exact same situation. There are parts of the province that have a ton of snow. I was up in Grande Prairie about three weeks ago, and it was like a winter wonderland. It’s the same thing where I’m from, in Lethbridge, Alberta. It’s very dry, and seeders are rolling. People will be done before other parts of western Canada even start.

We have a ton of flood watches going on. In fact, sandbagging is happening already in parts of the province, and that leads me to think about the years where my dad would have to leave large parts of the field unseeded because when he was seeding in the spring it was still too wet to get there. So even the number of seedable acres could be down this year.

HANEY: Yeah, when we get into these kinds of seasons – and of course we are only in April; this may turn around very quickly – if we jump past what feels like a little bit of a late winter and we just jump into summer, this could turn very, very quickly. But this is the kind of spring where it requires some patience, right? We don’t want to mud stuff in. We want to try our best to have as much of that soil as fit as possible before we start to get out there and put seed in the ground. But it does present some challenges on wheat. Pre-burn, weed control and a whole bunch of operational things like that. It’s going to be one of those springs where we’re trying to make a lot of tough decisions, and we won’t know till the end of the year if we made the right ones.

This recent news about Monette Farms, which, of course, in the province of Saskatchewan is one of the biggest farming operations. But we have just heard that they have filed for creditor protection. This could have fairly significant implications in a number of different ways, Shaun, depending on how this plays out.

HANEY: This is getting a lot of traction across Canada and the U.S., for sure. When you have probably Canada’s largest farm and one of the largest farms in North America file for creditor protection, it’s going to definitely get some questions. The timing is a real challenge here. Not only is it tough in this kind of environment to do what they have to do in terms of trying to restructure debt, but also the fact there’s a crop to put in. So there’s always this question of “too big to fail,” and there’s definitely some challenges, but I think the best thing that could happen for the industry is, hopefully, they get through this, because this kind of thing makes bankers nervous. And if bankers are nervous, that ripples through the whole industry. So it’s definitely a situation where you can see how it happens. Rapid growth, tough markets, bad yields in some of the areas. And whether you’re big or small, it’s the challenges of the challenges.

High input costs. You can throw that in there as well.

HANEY: Absolutely.

I talked with a farmer yesterday who is in the area where the home farm is for Monette. And he said to me that there’s a lot of farmers in the area that had made the decision when approached by the corporation to sell our lease their land. Not only did they opt to do that, but many of those farmers decided to liquidate their equipment, get rid of it. So even the option for many of them to go out and start farming their own land again isn’t necessarily there. So that’s why I feel like this could be complicated, depending on how it plays out at the same time.

HANEY: That’s a business decision they made, right? So if you decided to sell a couple years ago to them, OK, that’s in the moment. That’s the decision. Hindsight is “woulda, coulda, shoulda.” “I should have bet on black and not red.” That’s life and business. I think one of the challenges here, depending on how much land is going to be liquidated, or how much of the leased land. If there’s some that can’t be farmed this year, who is going to farm it? And the reality is, I think a lot of people are thinking “There’s young farmers that would love to get their hands on some of that.” How is that going to happen, given some of the financial realities, not only from a capital perspective, but also the current operational environment? Not a lot of stuff pencils out in 2026, so there’s really no easy answers, especially with us being here at the back end of April.