Article:
Signs Of The
Last Times
There's a crunch under Kent Erickson's shoes as he walks onto his canola fields in Irma, Alta., 175 kilometres southeast of Edmonton. You can practically hear the dry with every footstep. He stops and kicks the dirt to demonstrate how little rain has fallen this month. "We're at roughly an inch of moisture when we're normally at five to six inches of moisture," he says. He picks one of the tiniest canola plants out of the dusty earth. Thin roots and tiny leaves tell the story.
"We want that crop really bushy and with as much vegetation as possible," Erickson, a farmer who serves on the board of the Alberta Wheat Commission told CBC News. "You look around today, and there's not a lot of vegetation." Only a scattered few plants are leafy and beginning to flower. As far as the eye can see, there is brown between the rows of undergrown canola crops. Erickson's wheat crop across a dusty gravel road may not be faring much better.
The stressed, failing crops are falling victim to the driest spring on the Prairies in the 68 years of national record-keeping.
