At this time of year, farmer Stan Cochrane's corn crop should be a few metres high. Instead, it's underwater on his southwestern Manitoba farm.
"It gets to a stage where once it covers all the land, it doesn't matter whether it's a foot deep or three feet deep," Cochrane said as he looked at the flooded field from inside the cab of his half-ton truck on Tuesday.
His family farm is in the Assiniboine Valley and near the Assiniboine River, about 15 kilometres north of Griswold. Cochrane, who is in his 70s, has lived there all his life and experienced flooding before.
But this month's torrential rains and flash floods in the Swan Valley region and Minitonas made it worse.
"In this area here, there's 550 acres," he said, nodding to the submerged cornfield.
"So, we've got almost a thousand acres that is flooded."
Jill Verwey, president of Keystone Agricultural Producers, said many Manitoba farmers lost crops because of this spring's extreme and damaging weather.
"I was actually through Selkirk on Monday and drove through that affected area northwest of Winnipeg, north of Elie. It's devastating," she said.
"There's fields that still have standing water. And in other fields, the water has receded, but there's no crop because it drowns."
It's too soon to know how many of the province's farmers couldn't seed because of rain, hail or dust storms, but Verwey estimated they were 90 per cent finished.
"The big crunch this year is the huge cost outlay and the investment. So, the margin is thin, and in a lot of cases — negative margins," she said.
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