When Donalee Jones and Scott Mowbray returned to their home town and began farming near Cartwright, Man., in 2008, the couple assumed that when things got busy, the family that they planned to have one day could easily be looked after by Scott’s parents, who lived on the yard of the Mowbray’s 2,000-acre grain farm.

They didn’t give a second thought to needing other options for child care even after their first two children Abigail and Norah were born in 2010 and 2011.

“The dream was I’d work from home while the kids napped,” says Jones, who works part-time in a home-based office as senior producer for a Winnipeg-based media company. “Or we’d take them on the tractor.”

Today she emphasizes the word “dream” as she talks about the scheduling nightmare that eventually piled up, with her trying to manage farmwork and the demands of her job while also trying to match grandparents’ schedules to children’s care needs.

Fortunately, help was on its way.

The Cartwright and Early District Learning Centre opened its doors in the fall of 2012 providing licensed spaces for 16 pre-schoolers and four infants. They signed up their children for a couple of days a week.

“We thought we might as well register the kids, to have that option to send them there when we were in a bind,” says Donalee.

“We discovered that it was fantastic. The kids loved it. And they were way better off.”

The couple immediately realized just how much pressure had been on everyone, including grandparents.

“We still rely on the grandparents quite a bit, of course, on evenings and weekends,” Jones says. “But it was really nice to have the option to send them to daycare a couple of days a week. Number one, it’s a safety issue. When we’re farming I do not like having the kids in the cab with me for any extended period of time. If I’m operating equipment, I need to focus on that, and having a kid in the cab is a distraction and potentially a safety issue.”

She’d felt equally divided with them at home while she tried to work in her home office.

“In either one of my jobs, I can’t do as good a job if my brain is split between Mom brain and work brain.”

That captures how many parents in this farm community felt, and why they’d advocated for daycare.

It was a pressure cooker for many young parents, says Riley Kemp, principal of Cartwright School, a father of three and a cattle producer.

Kemp was serving on the board of the local community development corporation back in 2010 when early conversations began about the need for a child care centre in the area, with talk that a daycare might see more young people choose to call Cartwright and the surrounding municipality of Roblin home, given that so many parents with young families now work.

Kemp and his wife Lee-Anne would soon to face the same dilemma; Lee-Anne is a physiotherapist and wanted to continue to work in her profession after their children were born.

In 2011 a survey showed 14 families required early learning centre services for 20 children, so the project was a go. Local councils agreed to kick in funding. By the autumn of 2012 construction had begun.

Meanwhile, a volunteer board began all the other work to start an Early Learning Centre, such as hiring staff, drafting policies, and signing legal documents.

This was a volunteer effort by a community convinced that investing in daycare is good for children and their working parents, and a boon to the community itself, says Kemp, who spent weekends and evenings with a dozen volunteers on jobs like drywalling.

The Cartwright and District Early Learning Centre opened in 2013 and immediately took the pressure off families struggling with child care.

“There were so many of us in the same boat, trying to figure out Mom-sharing dates,” recalls Kemp.

Child care deserts

Parents across the country who face long waitlists or have no child care options whatsoever know how rocky that boat can be. And there are untold numbers of them.

In 2018 the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) uncovered what it dubs “child care deserts” in Canada. Their report mapped licensed child care spaces against the number of children by postal code, with a desert defined as any postal code with more than 50 under-school-aged children, and fewer than one space for every three.

What it showed is that child care deserts are proportionately more prevalent in rural areas, says report author and CCPA senior economist David Macdonald.

“What’s pretty clear as you move to smaller centres, you get lower coverage rates,” Macdonald says. “There’s fewer child care spaces for the number of children that live in those rural areas.”

No matter the province, cities with populations over 100,000 show higher rates of child care coverage compared to rural areas.

Provincial policies also matter, says Macdonald. In rural Quebec, for example, there is roughly one space for every two children. “That’s more or less the best case.”

“Then you get the worst-case scenario, which is in places like Saskatchewan where you’ve got one space for every 10 children or so.”

Out of the way

Those numbers do not surprise Treena Epp. She’s the executive director of the Ever Green Early Learning Centre in the small southwestern Saskatchewan town of Cabri — pronounced “Kay-bree” — located about 40 minutes northwest of Swift Current.

Until Ever Green opened here in 2013, parents drove hours per day to put their children in daycare. Cabri (pop. 390) is surrounded by other communities including Abbey, Pennant, and nearby Success.

“Some parents from Abbey were driving past Cabri, past Pennant to Success, where there was a daycare, to drop their kids off and then driving back to work,” says Epp. That was a 40-minute drive one way for some.

“It was out of the way, put it that way.”

A half-dozen local parents in Cabri who were caring for each other’s children finally decided enough was enough. They set out to establish Ever Green, and after multiple donations of money, toys and furniture, untold volunteer hours devoted to navigating the complexities of establishing and operating a daycare, plus capital and operating grants secured from the province, Cabri finally opened with 25 licensed spaces, starting in the local United Church until renovations were completed on a building made available by the town.

Having child care in Cabri now makes a huge difference to local families, says Epp. And it is responsive to their needs. The centre is busiest during the peak work time on the farm, and they’ll keep the centre open as long as 12 hours a day providing quality care and also addressing parental concerns about keeping children out of harm’s way when they need to be wholly engaged in seeding and harvest.

“We’ll have kids here 10 and 11 hours during that time,” Epp says.

On-farm child care

It was for farm children’s safety that farmers in Ontario’s Durham County took the same bull by the horns.

In this case, though, an entirely different approach evolved in the late 1980s after the Uxbridge area was stunned by three young children’s deaths in farming-related accidents in a single year. Those tragedies prompted the Women’s Institute (WI) at Bethesda Reach to get involved, and its surveys revealed a desire for a flexible model of childcare that would provide child care right on the farm.

In 1989, the approach was tried, hiring college students enrolled in early childhood education and using summer employment grants to pay them to provide that care from late spring to fall. Federal funding that same year enabled hiring a director to co-ordinate the program, and in 1991, to start up a family resource and toy lending library.

The entity then incorporated and became Durham Farm and Rural Family Resources (DFRFR) which, among other programs, continues to offer farm families the on-farm child care they need during peak work seasons in spring and summer. Parents pay a fee of $10 per hour to have up to four children cared for on the farm.

Katelyn Larmer, a Nestleton, Ont. dairy farmer and mother of three children ages five, three, and one, now co-ordinates the program and also uses the service when she needs to focus on her farm work.

A seasonal, flexible program like this works well for families like theirs because both she and her husband work on the farm and do not have off-farm jobs, Larmer says. It means there’s no need for travel to take their kids elsewhere to daycare, plus they’re not paying fees for spaces they’d only need periodically.

“During the busy times of the year on the farm I can focus on the farm as opposed to having to split my focus,” she says.

“It’s peace of mind knowing that they’re well looked after and they’re at home, they’re learning and having a good time. And I can focus on what I need to get done on the farm.”

But the DFRFR program may need to change in the future. More parents are working off-farm nowadays. The number of farm families using it has actually declined in recent years, a sign the program needs to be more widely promoted, but also that farmers’ child care needs are changing.

“We are currently exploring options that would broaden the scope of the program to include farm families who have off-farm income but are still needing occasional child care — particularly during the peak farming season of May to August,” says Karen Barkey, another Durham County dairy farmer who has co-ordinated the program since 2010.

Meeting needs

Balancing family needs versus what’s possible within funding limits is always the challenge. It can be tough to hire or retain staff when budgets are tight, and there are always ongoing costs.

In Cabri, Epp manages a very tight budget. They’re reluctant to raise rates when operating grants don’t cover their costs, which they barely do.

“One of the biggest complaints is the rates but we can’t function without proper funds coming in,” Epp says. “We’re keeping them as low as we can,” she says, adding that fundraisers are helping keep the lights on.

“Every dollar counts,” Epp says. “We have to be very careful.”

It reveals a core truth. The provision of child care services depends on individual efforts to create it, says Martha Friendly, executive director of the Toronto-based Childcare Resource and Research Unit and co-author of a 2016 report titled Child care can’t wait until the cows come home: Rural child care in the Canadian context.

“This is how child care develops in Canada,” says Friendly. “The rule of thumb across the country is that if you want child care, you have to organize it yourselves. And then you need to make sure that the hydro bill is paid.”

Their review of rural child care was prepared to inform discussion among parents, service providers and policy makers trying to improve it, and points to a wide range of challenges for the delivery of rural child care. Difficulties include finding and retaining qualified staff, the lack of suitable physical facilities, limited capital funding, and low enrolment — not due to a lack of need but to affordability or fluctuating enrolment. Limited base funding is a further barrier to providing ongoing affordable care.

Specific rural challenges include populations spread over wider geographic areas, and families needing child care for seasonal and on standard work hours.

Then, there’s the reality of Canada’s market-based approach to offering child care.

Child care services are mostly unplanned, primarily financed by parent fees, and provided almost entirely by private non-profit and private for-profit service providers.

“It’s not a public responsibility, like schools or sewers, which it is in other countries,” says Friendly.

“This is the main reason why there are child care deserts in rural communities… there’s no public way of saying we need child care and what kind of child care should it be.”

In the meantime, parents are working.

“It’s positive to see families organizing like they do,” says Macdonald. “However, they are forced to organize because governments are not proactive in locating centres where children are.”

Focused on growth

Though more now see the connection between accessible child care and economic growth, few of us have a clear idea of the difference it would make for those living and working in rural Canada if there was a well-funded, systematic approach to planning and developing affordable, quality services.

It’s something that farm policy groups are looking into, though, and they are forming “rural life committees” to address the specific needs of farm family life.

The Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA) has been arguing for years that child care is a fundamental service in rural areas. It’s part of the infrastructure that will keep farm families on the farm and maintain their substantial contributions to the economy, says OFA president Keith Currie, who adds that childcare is increasingly needed as more and more farm parents work.

It’s true too for potential farm employees, who need access to child care to take those jobs.

Indeed, the OFA believes accessible, affordable, quality child care will revitalize rural areas because it will be an enticement for more people to live and work there, creating jobs, expanding local skills and spurring economic growth and prosperity.

But to do that, it says, rural areas need a range of solutions to meet the fluctuating needs of farm parents — from drop-in centres, to kids’ camps, on-farm daycare, licensed centres, programs for school-aged children, and support for informal caregivers.

A necessity in rural areas

Manitoba’s Riley Kemp agrees. The idea that quality child care offered locally would be good for their entire community is what the Cartwright group has been arguing from the start, he says.

But then there’s the question: Do small rural economies merit this kind of support?

There’s also the question, “What happens in five years if there aren’t any kids around?”

Kemp’s rebuttal is pointed. “If in five years there aren’t any kids, the community has bigger problems than a building that can be picked up and moved,” he says. “If there aren’t kids going to a daycare in five years, then our town will be in dire straits, no schools and no businesses.”

It’s been six years since Cartwright cut the ribbon on its 2,400-square-foot Early Learning Centre. In it work three full-time and two part-time staff, as well as additional casual helpers. The centre spends most of its operating budget locally, generating additional economic spinoffs.

And there’s still plenty of young parents and children in Cartwright and the surrounding municipality of Roblin using it; it operates near capacity most days of the week.

The school population has also grown in recent years, adds Kemp.

“We might not be able to say one is related to the other, but it’s a pretty close relationship that we end up with more kids in our school because we’re able to support families,” he says.

“Daycares are a necessity in rural communities if we’re going to be viable.”

Jones, whose family now includes a one-and-a-half-year-old son Samuel, says she recognizes now why child care options are one of the fundamental services young families inquire about when weighing the decision to move back to farm or to work in a small town.

“We fought really hard to keep our school in the 1990s. Everyone understands the importance of a school and how without one a community has difficulty attracting new people and young people,” she says.

“A daycare also sways someone’s decision as to whether they’re going to move home to farm, or whether they’re going to move back to their small town.”

Some touted it as the new high-yielding wheat class that would free farmers from the rigid standards of CWRS, but nearly four years after its creation, Canada Northern Hard Red (CNHR) hasn’t made much of a dent in Prairie wheat acreage.

Some predicted CNHR’s acres would rival or even surpass Canada Western Red Spring. The thinking was that post-Canadian Wheat Board, a class with slightly lower quality but higher yield would excel in an open market. But CNHR accounted for just two per cent of total insured Prairie wheat acres in 2018. That was up 12 per cent from 2017, but largely because some former CWRS varieties were reclassified as CNHR. That upset many farmers in Alberta and Saskatchewan — 25 popular CWRS and Canada Prairie Spring (CPS) red wheats were transferred to CNHR August 1, 2018, resulting in lower prices.

CNHR is “the class where good varieties go to die,” west-central Saskatchewan farmer David Kucher tweeted in response to a request for CNHR feedback.

The Canadian Grain Commission (CGC) added to the anger over class “demotions” when last April it announced that five more CWRS wheats — AAC Redwater, AC Domain, Muchmore, Vesper and 5605 HR CL — will move to CNHR in 2021.

AAC Redwater is popular with Alberta farmers in the Parkland region because it matures four to five days earlier than other varieties but still yields well, Alberta Wheat Commission (AWC) general manager Tom Steve said in an interview last spring.

Gives every variety a home

Starting August 1, 2015, on an “interim” basis, then made permanent by the Canadian Grain Commission in January 2016, CNHR was created after a year of industry consultation. It was designed to give Western farmers and Canadian wheat customers access to new varieties, while protecting CWRS and CPS quality.

“I think it’s (CNHR) an important class because it fills a hole and gives every (wheat) product a home,” says Todd Hyra, SeCan’s business manager for Western Canada.

Adam Dyck, Canadian program manager for British baker Warburtons, which buys Western Canadian wheat, sees CNHR as a tool, rather than a class.

“It’s a tool to get varieties registered,” he says. “There was a time when stuff coming through registration… there would be nowhere for a variety to go. We’re at a stage now where there’s a class for every wheat variety to go into.”

That gives wheat breeders, farmers and end-users valuable options, says Hyra. A breeder might develop a wheat highly resistant to fusarium head blight, but in the past if the end-use quality didn’t meet the class standard it wouldn’t get registered. CNHR, along with Canada Western Special Purpose (CWSP), a class created in 2008, ends that problem.

CWRS catches up

The demand for the new class was largely driven by farmers who wanted to grow high-yielding U.S. spring wheat varieties. One was the late John Smith, president of Seed Depot in Pilot Mound, Man. In 2012 Smith began a quest to get Faller and Prosper, two high-yielding Dark Northern Spring (DNS) wheats registered in Canada.

In February 2015 the Prairie Recommending Committee for Wheat, Rye and Triticale (PRCWRT) recommended interim registration for both varieties, which for several years had been grown under identity-preserved Warburton contracts.

In May 2015, the CGC announced it was creating a new “interim” wheat class effective August 1, 2015.

In a letter to then-CGC chief commissioner Elwin Hermanson in 2015, Smith foresaw challenges the new class would create. “When anticipating the way the wheat classes will function after envisioned changes in classes are implemented, we believe the uncomfortable transition period is easily justified to achieve this end.”

But after initial enthusiasm for the U.S. varieties, insured plantings of Faller, Prosper and Elgin ND declined 51 per cent from a peak of 328,495 acres in 2016 to only 160,887 in 2018.

That may be because registration of some hot new CWRS varieties has narrowed the yield gap. Four years ago Faller and Prosper consistently outyielded CWRS by 20 per cent, offsetting a CNHR discount to CWRS which ranges between 20 and 50 cents a bushel. But over the last three years Manitoba CNHR yields averaged only 11 per cent above CWRS.

John Smith’s son Walter, now one of the owners of Seed Depot, says Faller is a money-maker.

“We farm too (as well as operating a seed business),” he says. “For us we have a tough time replicating the profit we can make growing something like Faller with anything else on our farm. There might not be an international market but we still have the option to grow, which is awesome in itself.

“You’re getting a 20 per cent better yield (with Faller) and maybe a five per cent price discount. Those farmers (growing it) aren’t spending any extra to get that yield. It’s just pure profit in their pocket.”

Wade Bartkiw, who farms near Rossburn, Man., just southwest of Riding Mountain National Park, grew Faller for the first time in 2018.

“Huge yields with it, but really low protein,” he responded in a tweet. “Sold it into the feed market and will continue to grow it. Bids around here are around 25 to 50 cents (a bushel) lower than HRS (CWRS). This year the yield made up for the price spread. See what next year brings.”

Another farmer tweeted: “Grew it (Faller) for the first time this year on a Warburtons’ contract. Got rejected for low protein. Sold into States for better price and shorter haul. Likely won’t grow again.”

But Faller remains one of Warburtons’ best varieties.

“We know it makes good Warburtons bread at really any protein level,” Dyck says.

Where’s the market?

With relatively few CNHR acres it’s no surprise the CNHR class hasn’t made a splash internationally.

“If the supply isn’t consistent they (customers) are less likely to want it unless the price convinces them to want it,” says John Peterson, Richardson International’s assistant vice-president of wheat merchandising and hedging.

“If you don’t have CNHR to offer on a consistent basis then it’s something that is secondary to a transaction and CWRS would be the main pull.”

Until 2018, CNHR was just Faller, Prosper and Elgin ND, and most acres were in southern Manitoba, Peterson notes.

“I don’t think we’ve sold any CNHR off the West Coast, at least as CNHR,” he says, adding some could have been sold in a blend or by specifications. “And off the East Coast, it’s minor.

“There might be some niche opportunities, but we’re not developing large-scale programs necessarily.”

That may be why some farmers, including Crystal City, Man. farmer Landon Friesen, sell their Faller in the U.S. “The Canadian system of wheat ‘classes’ doesn’t make sense to me,” he said in a tweet. “Millers want it (CNHR) just as much as CWRS, but yet they pay 25 cents a bushel less for it in Canada. Only reason we grow it is to move it south and get a better price.”

Peterson is reserving judgment on CNHR. While he doesn’t think the new class adds a lot of extra system costs, he’s a bit worried about the potential for lower-value CNHR wheats getting mixed into CWRS. The tolerance for admixtures is low and can result in expensive downgrading.

Things can change, but main export demand now is for CWRS, says Peterson. “The CWRS class has got some recognition to it, people understand it and if we can supply what the market wants, and if it still works for the farmer, that’s what we should be selling.”

Alberta Wheat Commission’s Tom Steve wonders if nine Western Canadian milling wheat classes are too many. CNHR could confuse wheat customers given it consists of wheats from three classes — CWRS, CPS and DNS.

“The Canadian wheat classes are consistent,” says Daryl Beswitherick, the CGC’s program manager for quality assurance standards. “There could be a variation in kernel sizes but this shouldn’t have a big impact on end-use functionality.”

“I do not see CNHR being sold as a class in the traditional sense,” Cereals Canada president Cam Dahl said in an email. “Rather it is a holding spot for varieties that have specific value that are sold based on specification or as a single variety lot.”

Farmers, meanwhile, are voting with their feet, says market analyst Mike Jubinville of MarketsFarm. “Acres are falling off a cliff,” he says.

But that doesn’t mean a future CNHR wheat can’t be a blockbuster, says Hyra. But going up against CWRS isn’t easy, he adds. “Any of the smaller classes really have to have exceptional agronomics in order to carve out a home.”

It was an eerie orange noon on August 15 and James Oberhofer needed to turn his truck lights on. When the agronomist for Six Strong Agronomy tried to scout under a canola field canopy, he saw only darkness. Things were in a stunning standstill as Alberta suffered the worst day in what had been a two-week smoke-out from forest fires in British Columbia.

Oberhofer’s scouting wasn’t the only thing in a smoke stall. Canola that still needed a couple of weeks to mature was doing nothing. “Crops were in stasis,” he says.

The smoke eventually cleared but was not forgotten. In mid-September, with cool and rainy conditions holding up harvest, one of Oberhofer’s clients, Trent Clark from Mannville, got into a Twitter conversation with Jason Tkachuk from Andrew about lingering consequences from those smoky August days.

“We didn’t really get the BTUs to bring the crop along so here we are with green canola still that was seeded third week of May,” Tkachuk tweeted. Clark replied, “The smoke was a factor here also. Things stood still for over 10 days.”

Stood still for 10 days? Is this possible?

Smoke not like clouds

Raju Soolanayakanahally says yes. The research scientist and plant physiologist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) in Saskatoon points to a few studies for proof.

John Calder from Brigham Young University in Utah co-authored a research article on the physiological effects of smoke exposure on trees, published in the International Journal of Forestry Research in 2010. The article says smoke can have physical and chemical effects on leaves. Physically, smoke can lead to a high vapour-pressure deficit that can trigger stomatal closure. Vapour-pressure deficit (VPD) is the difference between the amount of moisture in the air and how much moisture the air can hold. While one might think of smoke and cloud as similar, clouds are the result of a low VPD. A smoke scenario is the exact opposite.

“Plants close stomata in response to smoke, and when they do that, they don’t mature, they delay flowering,” Soolanayakanahally says. “Smoke slows down the whole biology of the plant.”

Chemically, many compounds in smoke — which Calder calls a “highly complex chemical cocktail” — are known to have physiological effects on plants. As the article describes, increased ozone in smoke has been linked to the destruction of chlorophyll and can inhibit the potassium channels that regulate stomatal opening. Sulphur dioxide in smoke reduces stomata function, among other things. Sulphur dioxide and nitrous oxide reduce major antioxidant enzymes in plants which, in combination with higher ozone, could promote oxidative stress during extended smoke exposure. The Calder study exposed test trees to smoke for only 20 minutes, and concluded that “20 minutes of smoke exposure resulted in a greater than 50 per cent reduction in photosynthetic capacity in five of the six species examined.”

Trees aren’t canola, but they are both plants.

Other studies suggest that smoke may not be all bad. Smoke has been shown to trigger germination in some seeds as part of a post-fire regrowth mechanism. A Pakistan study by Muhammad Iqbal et al., published in Biotechnology Reports in 2018, exposed wheat seeds to plant-derived smoke (from burning leaves and straw) for one to two hours, and reported that smoke was like a “vegetative growth promoter” for those seeds. A 2010 Australian study by David C. Nelson et al. had a name for the seed germination stimulants in wildfire smoke — karrikins. That study, also on seeds, looked for the Arabidopsis thaliana genes that promoted germination and seedling growth in response to karrikin treatment.

But, as noted, these positive-effect studies were on seeds. A smoke treatment to trigger germination is quite different from long-term exposure to smoke during peak photosynthetic periods. As the Calder study would suggest, even short exposure to smoke during peak growth periods may impede plant growth. Unfortunately, we don’t have scientific studies for smoke effects on in-season growth of crops. All we have are smoke and sunlight penetration data and farmer observations.

A bad year for smoke

Environment Canada data supports what Oberhofer, Clark, Tkachuk and all other farmers in central Alberta suspected: It was a bad year for smoke. Edmonton had 230 “smoke-hours” between May and September 2018. Smoke-hours are daylight hours where smoke reduces visibility to six miles or less. It was the worst summer stretch on record, by far. The next highest for Edmonton was 110 smoke-hours for the same period in 1961. Last year had 63.

Smoke also inhibits sunlight penetration. Dena and Norm Viallet have solar panels on their farm at Treherne, Man. On August 16, they had a “weird and almost scary” yellow sky from heavy smoke — probably the same smoke that covered Alberta the day before.

“You knew something wasn’t right that day,” Dena says, especially when it came to solar power production. In a graph of their power production through August 2018, it was like the sun took a break on August 16. Kilowatt hours dropped to almost nothing. “Those panels can still produce really well on cloudy days,” she says, “which is why you can still get a sunburn on a cloudy day.” But solar energy on a smoky day? Not so much.

A comment from Environment Canada’s media office would support this.

“From a scientific point of view, the presence of smoke could have affected sunlight incident at the surface. A smoke layer will generally absorb and scatter the sunlight, thereby reducing the amount reaching the surface. If the smoke layer is thicker — i.e. a heavy smoke layer instead of a thin haze — then it can cause a larger reduction in the sunlight reaching the surface.”

Anastasia Kubinec, manager of crop industry development with Manitoba Agriculture, says the mid-August smoke didn’t have a huge effect on Manitoba crop maturity because by that time most crops were done growing and were advancing toward harvest readiness. As a result, most of Manitoba’s harvest was done before the rainy period started in early September. (Oberhofer had the same observation for earlier-seeded canola crops in his territory. Canola seeded in early May was not at a sensitive growth stage when the smoke came, and those crops matured as expected, he says.)

Delayed flowering

Kubinec also points to 2015. In that year, heavy smoke came to Manitoba in early July and, though the information was anecdotal and not replicated in a scientific study, Kubinec says there was evidence that smoke delayed crops that year. Canola needs a range of 177 to 270 growing degree days (GDD), base 0 C, to advance from bud stage to 50 per cent flower. Southern Manitoba was getting approximately 20 GDD per day through that smoky July period, so canola crops, based on the GDD requirement, should have taken nine to 14 days to move from bud to 50 per cent flower. “In 2015, canola took the full 14 days,” she says, suggesting that smoke probably pushed bud-to-flower advancement to the top end of its GDD range that year.

The GDD calculation is simple: Add daily maximum to daily minimum then divide by two and subtract the base temperature. A day with a high of 30 C and a low of 10 C will produce 20 GDD, base 0 C. But GDD is all about temperature. And to go back to central Alberta 2018, temperature was not the problem. In fact, seasonal GDDs for Edmonton reached 1,690 by mid-August 2018, compared to 1,615 for the same time period in 2017 and the long-term average of 1,608. But GDDs don’t account for smoke. Because temperatures are often lower with smoke or cloud, the calculation indirectly accounts for these conditions, but GDD doesn’t account for chemical effects of smoke or the physical difference in sunlight penetration for smoky days versus cloudy days.

Plant physiologist Soolanayakanahally concludes that days and days of smoky haze will cause crop delays, especially if the smoke comes before plants are fully grown, podded out and starting to mature.

But a 10-day delay? It seems so, yes.