Opinion: Better production practices help farmers survive drought

At the heart of John Palliser’s triangle is the steppe that runs west in Saskatchewan from the Montana border to Lethbridge. It can be dry country.

In the 1860s, when the explorer came through that part of the Northwest Territory, he saw little potential for farming, preferring the area we now call the dark brown, black and gray soil zones of the Prairies. The area in the lighter brown zone would only be fit for livestock, Palliser surmised.

But 160 years later, crops are doing, at least economically, better than cattle in that zone. Palliser couldn’t have foreseen all the technology farmers use today to get those crops or the risk management tools used to keep producers on the land through the worst years.

It’s not that the heart of the triangle hasn’t seen drought before. It was a little droughty after the First World War, similar to parts of the 1930s. After the Great Depression, when people in the region talked about the bad drought of that period, they mostly referred to 1936, a year that was less than one-third as dry as 2022. Dry conditions combined with heavy tillage at that time left farmers struggling to grow anything.