I have always encouraged people to take a moment or three at the end of any significant period in their lives to reflect on what happened and what they can learn from the events. I would say that at a minimum, growers should examine each growing season. Since the months that precede and follow the growing season have an impact, it bears giving the entire year a bit of a review. I’ve done this for many years.
“Why bother?” you ask. Well, frankly, it provides a chance to gain some closure and to tie up loose ends, mentally, at least. It also helps to provide some perspective in future years. Having a documented summarized record of your year gives you something to compare it to. It is easy to become lost in the immediate mire that you find yourself in, not realizing that you’ve probably dealt with similar issues in the past. For example, after a drought year, it is easy to forget that we had dry years in the not-too-distant past. Ditto for wet years.
So, what happened in 2021? Sadly, I’d say that most of the 2021 was dominated by TWO elements, Covid-19, and the weather. I won’t go into personal specifics but will speak of what I observed and took away from the year.
Normally, I’d start with the weather, but since Covid-19 and its many variants are still sticking around like annoying relatives without fixed plans, it bears addressing. The Covid of 2020 carried over into 2021, with new and “exciting” twists introduced every month or two. Wherever you fall in your individual opinions, it is undisputable that Covid-19 has had major and lasting impacts on all aspects of our lives. I would say that in 2021, armed with the new skills and knowledge gained on the fly in 2020, growers were better prepared for another Covid-19 season. Where most garden centres sold out of vegetable transplants and bedding plants early in 2020, in 2021, growers had a wide and diverse array of product available, and I didn’t hear about people running out like they had the previous year. Gardeners were a bit savvier, even the noobs, what with having a year of experience under their belts.
Growers also had a good handle on moving clientele through their businesses, whether in the form of curbside pickups, or reduced volume spaces. Many growers reported that they were able to scale back their hours, overall, without economic impact. The open hours were more sales-dense and efficient, as people came, shopped, and then left. This allowed growers to manage their labour costs more effectively. Covid-19 made labour an even bigger challenge than normal, as managing spread required careful handling. Those that rely in part of foreign labour had an especially challenging year.
Most growers had their Covid-19 protocols in place, with the 2021 version more robust and beefed up enough to allow them to bring more or different customer sets through the farms and businesses than in 2020.
The primary positives of Covid-19 would probably be that people are trying to reinvest in their local economies and industries. The “Local” movement is alive and growing stronger. I can’t say that it hasn’t been a tough couple of years, but I think that most businesses that were able to weather the Covid-19 storm are emerging stronger than before. It has required creativity and nimbleness, but that has been the formula for successful, sustainable businesses since forever.
One of the things that continued in 2021 was the wide range of virtual extension event offerings that growers could take advantage of. If you had a particular interest, you could find an event to feed it. Despite a fair bit of “Zoom-fatigue” (which I think fits more with formal meetings), people were somewhat more tech-savvy. There were some really awesome webinars and online events available from across the world.
On the downside, things haven’t returned enough to normal to fully allow in-person events, resulting in continued online/virtual events, or cancelled or postponed events. While people have been complaining about how tired they are with virtual meetings, once in-person events fully relaunch, I imagine people will find that they are soon exhausted by the sheer volume of events they can/must attend.
On to the weather. You could find different examples of bad or extreme weather anywhere you want to talk about, but on the Prairies, it was dry. Hot and dry. As seems typical, things started off a bit slow, but then suddenly we had atypically hot weather throughout most of the season. Also typically, most areas had little moisture throughout the growing season, with low soil reserves to start with. It made things a bit challenging, to be sure. If you had water for irrigation, it was a better year, yield-wise, for most crops, although water reserves were quickly exhausted. If you didn’t have water, then things were a bit tougher. Bush fruit suffered a bit with the lack of moisture during fruit fill, but most fruit came through pretty well, with decent quality. It tended to ripen quite quickly. Some fruit was a bit smaller, but that depended on where you were located.
The dry conditions did have a positive side effect. We saw relatively little disease, at least from a biological standpoint. We certainly saw lots of physiological or environmental-related disorders, with heat blasts, deformities, and abnormal growth.
The fall period was pretty open. We had good weather through most of September, into October. This allowed harvesting to be completed in time. Unfortunately, it didn’t exactly freeze hard to kill off bugs, so some stuck around for a while. The weather of the past couple of weeks should take care of most of them, I hope.
The weather in other regions definitely impacted us locally. Having the transport of goods from the west coast suddenly severed highlighted how dependant and interconnected our industries are. The supply issues that have dominated the past year to 18 months continue to pile up. This has affected input costs, significantly.
If we circle back to the weather from the first 4 months of the year, we had our customary frigid February, but the other months weren’t too terrible (bad memories blur a bit, so I can’t really say with confidence). I don’t think that we came out with a lot of moisture, which led to some of the moisture challenges in the summer.
Generally, there are lots of new projects and plenty of optimism out there. Operations are expanding and growing, with new plans being developed. There is sufficient caution out there to properly temper the ideas. We’re seeing some big greenhouse acreage expansions this year, with most of them coming fully into production by Spring 2022. The field horticulture crops are steady, for the moment, but they don’t tend to change all the dramatically year to year.
2021 saw several indigenous agriculture projects launched. It is interesting to see how each is quite different, but all have similar intentions, which is to allow people to regain some control over their food.
I’ll end by summarizing 2021 like this. It was challenging, but with a healthy dose positivity. We survived the year, which is nothing to sneeze at. Chalk it up as a cautious win and move forward with hope for the future.