YORKTON - After a winter that seems colder and snowier than normal – although that might be my impression based on this season being the eve of my 65th birthday – the current uptick in temps has me thinking spring.
While common Saskatchewan-bred sense tells me spring might still be weeks away, one can hope.
And, certainly farmers have to be sitting at their office desks, or kitchen tables for some, determining what crops to put in the ground come spring – or perhaps more accurately which crops they wish they could plant.
Certainly for many producers cropping options by this time of year are more restricted than non-producers might imagine.
Modern production tends to be focused on long-term cropping rotations farmers tend not to want to veer from because over the years they have proven successful.
What crops can be grown in a particular field in any given year are also constrained by what crop protection – weed control – products were used in the previous year, and to an extent what fertilizers might have been fall applied.
Farmers also tend to sign contracts – many last fall – which set how what they need to produce to honour what they signed – again limiting what they might wish to grow by March.
So there are restrictions on what a producer can do, but this year maybe more opportunity for some regret over such restrictions.
Every spring there are things which lay on the horizon which may impact prices of a particular crop – from pressures on fertilizer prices that hit certain crops more than others, or world supply levels hinting at price hikes, or declines, but this year there is a bigger wild card – Donald Trump.
Irrational tariffs have been imposed by the U.S. president, and those will have a ripple effect on a range of exports leading back to what farmers are growing in 2025.
We might like to believe if we negotiate with Trump we can come to a deal, but while a concession might buy Canada a few more tariff-free weeks – the American wild card will just make his threat again, and ultimately he’ll impose them no matter the impact to the common-person on either side of the border. We are after all at a point where the US sided with Russia at the United Nations, and Trump blames Ukraine for being invaded – common humanity has fled the White House.
So cropping in 2025 will be more of a dice roll than usual, but perhaps because of what he previously noted restrictions are a good thing – forcing a staying-of-the-course – rather than trying to guess what Trump will mean in the months ahead.
