A crowd favourite for his excellent knowledge of weather trends and forecasts, Drew Lerner, of World Weather Inc., was one of many speakers at FarmTech this year. Although often busy due to his willingness to share his insights, Lerner was able to stop by the RealAg Lounge to give producers a feel for what’s to come for the seeding season ahead. In regards to moisture, for the most part, what eastern Canada has is what the west needs and vice versa.

“The biggest problem with the conditions in the east right now, is the very wet conditions they ended with … it’s really a big mess,” he says adding that with storms to continue on into the spring, there’s still going to be too much moisture in the ground. Unfortunately, he doesn’t believe producers in the east will see the dry conditions they need in order to get in the field at a normal time; however, he says it should dry up closer to the later part of May — typically at the tail end of seeding. On the flip side, Lerner says the west has tremendous amounts of moisture deficits that remain from the 2017 and 2018 crop years.

“The pattern we’re going into this spring, is going to promote a tendency for more below average moisture,” Lerner says pointing out we have an El Niño event coming up. He says that usually means, central and southern Saskatchewan and southern Alberta tend to have drier bias in the spring, but on the bright side, that doesn’t mean there won’t be any rain adding, “there’s still going to be a chance for precipitation, it’s just going to be less than normal.”

As far as northern Alberta goes, he says they’re going to continue to have heavy moisture and will deal with a frequent occurrence of rain. Lerner does however point out, over in Manitoba, it will be a bit of a different story for spring as he predicts it’s going to be a wet one.

“(There will be) a  lot of storms going from southwest to northeast across the U.S. and they’ll come up into the Great Lakes region they’ll end up wrapping around up there, so there will be a bunch of backwash that will come up from the states into Manitoba.”

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