Wet June spurs bountiful berries, flooded fields and sewage flowing into Winnipeg waterways
CBC
A wetter than normal June is being welcomed by berry growers but it's causing problems for some other Manitoba farmers and contributing to more untreated sewage flowing into Winnipeg waterways.
Winnipeg got 103.2 millimetres of precipitation last month, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada, making it the eighth wettest June in the past 30 years.
"It's kind of keeping everything wet from the extremely wet month of May," said meteorologist Alysa Pederson.
In March, April and May, Winnipeg got a combined 166 mm which is about 150 per cent above normal precipitation for those three months of 111 mm.
Angie Cormier who owns Cormier's Berry Patch located near La Salle, Man., is grateful for it.
Her 15 acre farm is seeing a bountiful crop of strawberries.
"The moisture and the weather has allowed for the berries to grow bigger and it's allowed for there to be a lot of berries on the plants," Cormier said.
Cormier, who also serves as executive director of the Prairie Fruit Growers Association, said it'll be good picking and good eating for all types of berries.
"It's not just strawberries but all fruit – haskap, saskatoons – we are all seeing more berries and the berries are bigger," she said.
It's a different story on Curtis McRae's grain, oilseed and cattle farm near St. Andrews, Man., where the rain is hurting his crops.
"A lot of them didn't get big enough to be able to handle the extra moisture," McRae said. "They're just having a hard time functioning because they're just wet all the time. Even crops that handle moisture well are yellowing."
Just getting to his crops has been a challenge with the soggy weather leading to rutted roads and fields.
"It's definitely been a mudfest," McRae said. "Roads have been difficult, fields have been difficult. Luckily we've actually had a tractor that was just available to have a tow rope on it all the time to have access to an extra pull whenever we got stuck."
"So we've been getting our PhDs in stuck tractors this year."