By now, Graham Snyder normally has all of his soybeans out of the ground.
But as of Monday, that wasn’t the case.
Snyder was in his Breslau-area fields all day, combining as much as he could before rain forecast for Tuesday moved into the area.
“We’re pushing the envelope as far as we can,” he said.
“Any rain, it just shuts it down.”
One warm week at the end of September was great for local soybean farmers, but Snyder said he doesn’t think Mother Nature has strung together three good days since then.
“We’ve been having a real struggle this year. The weather just doesn’t seem to want to stick with us,” he said.
Twenty-five kilometres to the west in St. Clements, Fred Wagner spent Monday making the same late-in-the-year attempt to salvage his soybeans.
Between a late spring, a cool summer and a muddy fall, he said it’s been one of the most challenging years he’s had.
“We’ve been behind basically from the start, and never really caught up,” he said.
It’s estimated that about half of Waterloo Region’s soybean crops remained in the ground as of Monday.
Thus far, there doesn’t appear to be any impact on consumer prices.
Many corn crops have yet to be plucked as well, but wet weather poses less of a barrier to harvesting those grains.
