Local farmers have put away their cowboy boots in favour of gum rubbers so far this growing season.
Those with cows have plenty to smile about right now, with lush pastures to feed their herds. When they look ahead to what they'll feed the animals in winter, however, the mood gets mouldier.
Ask Wally Steidle how things are on his 800 acres southwest of Prince George and the response is: "Wet. Terrible. Squishy."
In the Pineview/Buckhorn area, Walter Anchikoski says he's farming "with a paddle."
Both said the hay wasn't quite ready to cut, but if they had to do it tomorrow it would be a disaster despite the excellent growth. By cutting it now, it would lay in windrows and get rained on, ruining the nutritional value of the tall grass.
"The hay crop is fine but the ground is no good," said Anchikoski. "The tractor would just sink in most places. The oats is coming up good in the high spots but it's gone yellow in the low areas. We've got good timothy - horse hay. So it's growing, but we couldn't get it off the field if we wanted to."
"This could be another year of silage. That's what we ended up having to do last year, and this is just the same," said Steidle.
Silage is a chopped salad version of hay that is stored in heaps and ferments into a kind of sauerkraut, instead of bales that need to be processed and stored dry.
"You can put up silage if you've got the cattle for it," Anchikoski explained. "A lot of people don't have the cattle so they are dependent on hay so they can sell it."
All of it, regardless of final form, requires tractor-pulled heavy machinery to do the harvesting. If the fields don't dry, that can be damaging to the fields.
Another complicating factor of wind and rain is knock-down.
"Some of my fields are laying over. The weight from the water knocked it down. That makes it harder to cut," said Steidle. "And my honey bees aren't able to fly. It appears the clover and the fireweed are heading out; they need to get out and get the work or their won't be much of a honey flow."
Anchikoski and Steidle agreed that the good growth so far, and the week or two more the hay should have to fully ripen, might play in farmers' favour.
"If the sun came out for a week we could maybe get on the land then, but no earlier, or the ground won't take the machinery," Anchikoski explained. "If you cut it young and full of juice it is harder to dry anyway. If you wait it out another couple of weeks that will get it to a better stage for cutting, and maybe by then it will dry the fields out."
