The deaths add pain to the U.S. cattle industry as producers have reduced herds due to drought and grappled with feed costs that climbed as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine tightened global grain supplies.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment knew of at least 2,000 cattle deaths due to high temperatures and humidity as of Tuesday, spokesperson Matthew Lara said. The toll represents facilities that contacted the agency for help disposing of carcasses, he said.

Kansas is the third largest U.S. cattle state behind Texas and Nebraska, with more than 2.4 million cattle in feedlots.

Cattle began suffering heat stress as temperatures and humidity spiked over the weekend in western Kansas and cooling winds disappeared, said Scarlett Hagins, spokesperson for the Kansas Livestock Association. The animals could not acclimate to the sudden change, she said.

“It was essentially a perfect storm,” said AJ Tarpoff, beef extension veterinarian for Kansas State University.

Temperatures reached 42 C in northwest Kansas by Monday, said Drew Lerner, president of World Weather Inc. This weekend, parts of western Kansas and the Texas panhandle will near 110 F (43.3 C), though stronger winds and lower humidity levels will help minimize cattle deaths, he said.

“It’s going to be oppressively hot and stressful for the animals,” Lerner said.

To survive, ranchers are providing cattle with extra water and checking their health.

“You can’t say, ‘Oh, I checked them three days ago,’” said Brenda Masek, president of the industry association Nebraska Cattlemen. “When it gets hot, you’ve got be to out every day and making sure that their water is maintained.”

— Tom Polansek reports on agriculture and ag commodities for Reuters from Chicago.

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“For feed wheat (on Tuesday), I finally got a bid of $10 per bushel, which is really an amazing bid,” said Dale McManus, broker for Johnston Grains at Welwyn, Sask.

The high-delivered bid for feed wheat in Saskatchewan was $8.50/bu. — $1 higher than last month, according to Prairie Ag Hotwire data for Tuesday. Feed wheat in Manitoba went up to $8.92/bu. and $10.31 in Alberta — monthly rises of 75 and 79 cents, respectively.

“A normal bid for feed wheat would be $6 or $7 (per bushel), in a normal year,” McManus said.

As for feed barley, Saskatchewan’s and Manitoba’s high-delivered bids were $7/bu., a $1 rise for both since June. In Alberta, the price was $8.71/bu. — $1.09 more than one month earlier.

McManus acknowledged, though, that crop conditions vary from place to place.

“There are places in Saskatchewan where the crops don’t look bad. It’s not a bumper crop and it won’t be a huge crop, but there will be something there and there are spots where there’s already nothing there. They’ve been written off,” he said, adding there are now larger portions of other grains going into feed, including rye.

McManus believes feed grain bids won’t go down anytime soon, but it would be hard to predict how much upside there is left.

“It all depends what the outcome of harvest is,” he said. “Expectations are that it’s going to be a poor crop and until we get into (new crop), we really won’t know.”

— Adam Peleshaty reports for MarketsFarm from Stonewall, Man.

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Transport Minister Omar Alghabra announced the order late Thursday, ahead of an authorized tour Friday by evacuated residents to the largely-destroyed village of Lytton, about 160 km southwest of Kamloops.

The order, he said, “is being put in place in the interest of safe railway operations and to protect residents who are temporarily returning to inspect their homes as safely as possible.”

The order requires CN and CP to “cease movement of trains except for emergency fire response, and maintenance and repair work” on their Ashcroft and Thompson subdivisions respectively, both of which run between Kamloops and Boston Bar, about 45 km south of Lytton.

Trains already in those subdivisions when the order comes into force “are permitted to navigate the subdivisions for the purposes of exiting.”

Asked Thursday — before Alghabra’s order was announced — about rail service through the affected region in the wake of fires, a CP representative said its mainline railway operations had “safely resumed” Monday afternoon. Response hadn’t yet been received from CN as of Friday morning.

“The safety of the public and our employees is our priority and we are implementing appropriate measures, such as increased inspections of our tracks and equipment, during this period of extreme weather,” CP said via email, noting its crews had completed safety inspections of tracks and infrastructure before rail operations restarted.

CP also said its crews “closely monitor conditions and continually watch for signs of wildfires. If spotted, any indication of a wildfire is immediately relayed to authorities.”

The decision comes amid media reports in which community leaders around Lytton cite unconfirmed reports that local train traffic sparked the fires.

The federal Transportation Safety Board later Friday said it deployed teams of investigators to Lytton and to the southeastern B.C. community of Sparwood, about 30 km northeast of Fernie. In its statements, the TSB said it was investigating a fire at Sparwood involving a freight train, while the Lytton fire was “potentially involving a freight train.”

The Ag Transport Coalition, which monitors Prairie grain movement by rail on behalf of member grain organizations and industry players, on Wednesday reported a “slowdown in operations as a result of the wildfires in the vicinity of Lytton.”

The coalition had reported “the closure of main lines for both CN and CP south of Kamloops effectively cutting off all access to and from the Port of Vancouver.”

“We continue to expect an extended recovery time given the magnitude of the outage and the recognition that this disruption has impacted all commodity traffic, not just grain,” the coalition said, noting over 2,600 cars, or about 80 per cent of all idle cars, were in the Vancouver rail corridor. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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Thirty-four temperature records were shattered on Friday, including those at Regina, Prince Albert, Swift Current, Weyburn and Yorkton. Saskatoon and Lucky Lake, northeast of Swift Current, were the province’s hot spots that day at 40 C. Nine more records were broken the next day, when Weyburn had the highest reading at 35.7 C.

The prolonged heat wave and lack of precipitation have combined to create crop conditions which are far from ideal.

“The crops look better from the road than when you actually go into them,” said Melody Ector, owner and vice-president of Diefenbaker Spice and Pulse at Elbow, Sask., where the mercury hit 39 C on Friday. “(They’re) fair, if anything. They’re not good. They do need rain.”

Despite the heat damage suffered by crops near Elbow, 130 km south of Saskatoon, lentils there have handled the heat better than others.

“They are looking OK in our area. They’re looking better than the canola, the durum, the wheat. I’ve seen pictures on Twitter of the pea crop. They do not look good at all,” Ector said, adding that current crop conditions will result in higher prices on the market.

“I see the prices to be steady or increase for chickpeas, lentils and peas just because the condition of the Saskatchewan crop isn’t looking good. We just need rain,” she said.

However, there was some relief on Sunday as parts of southern Saskatchewan received various amounts of rainfall. Kindersley, in the west-central region, saw 70 mm of rain in a 30-minute span.

“(Elbow) did get (10 mm), which helped. But with the heat we experienced over a whole week of high temperatures, we need more than what the forecasts (say),” Ector said.

— Adam Peleshaty reports for MarketsFarm from Stonewall, Man.

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Over 710,000 lightning events were recorded in British Columbia and northwestern Alberta between 3 p.m. on Wednesday and 6 a.m. on Thursday, up from an average 8,300 from the same period over the past five years, said Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist with Vaisala, a global environmental measurements company which collects the data.

Of those events, the company said, over 112,000 were “cloud-to-ground” lightning, while over 597,000 were “in-cloud” pulses.

British Columbia has been recovering from the grip of an unprecedented heat wave, which has so far caused 719 confirmed deaths, triple what would normally occur in the same time period, the province’s chief coroner said on Friday.

During the heat wave, the town of Lytton, southwest of Kamloops, broke Canada’s 80-plus year old heat record with a 49.6 C temperature. A forest fire that started on Wednesday razed Lytton to the ground, and caused two deaths. The cause of the fire was under investigation.

British Columbia usually accounts for about five per cent of Canada’s total lighting strikes each year, but it has reported its annual number in less than 48 hours, Vagasky said.

The figure is comparable to “what you would typically see on some of the bigger lightning days in really lightning prone regions of the United States, like Texas or Oklahoma,” Vagasky said, and is unheard of for a region like British Columbia.

The high number of lightning strikes was caused in part by the heat wave, which created high levels of moisture in the atmosphere in the form of melting snow and evaporation of water from vegetation, said Jonathan Bau, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada.

The moisture fueled the unusually fierce thunderstorms.

“We’re not in the middle of summer where everything’s dried out,” Bau said, adding that more lightning was forecast for the weekend.

The strikes caused several forest fires across central British Columbia, with 136 fires burning as of Friday afternoon, B.C. officials said at a briefing.

The fires are expected to burn through 100,000 hectares (247,105 acres) by the end of the weekend, officials said, a significantly higher figure than by this point in previous years — B.C. does not usually see its forest fire season ramp up until late July.

Over 1,300 homes have been ordered evacuated, and it is not known how many people are missing. The Red Cross is running a phone line for family reunification, officials said.

— Reporting for Reuters by Moira Warburton in Vancouver. Includes files from Glacier FarmMedia Network staff.

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One trader, however, warns that canola contracts may be in for a mercurial few weeks.

“We’re clearly in a weather market that is extremely volatile,” said Errol Anderson of Calgary-based ProMarket Communications. “With this extreme hot weather coming right at flowering, definitely we have yield damage.

“The market is starting to reflect that… It’s been quite explosive this week, but when we get explosiveness, we’ll also get selloffs as well.”

The vegetable oil market, which plays a major role in canola prices, has recently seen downward pressure, as weather conditions in the eastern U.S. Midwest have seen more moisture than in Western Canada.

On the other side, a weakening Canadian dollar has also brought support to canola.

As canola prices rise sharply, so too they can fall just as quickly, according to Anderson.

“If the canola market does relax, we’re going to see a selloff,” he said. “But, the unpredictability of this market is very, very difficult. Trying to predict day-to-day movement is extremely difficult.

“Tighten up your seatbelt. It’s going to be a wild one.”

— Adam Peleshaty reports for MarketsFarm from Stonewall, Man.

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“The forward forecasts have the heat that is presently over the Pacific Northwest to move over the western corn belt early next week, and even touch parts of Iowa by the end of next week,” Charlie Sernatinger, global head of grain futures at ED+F Man Capital, said in a note to clients.

Some bargain buying also was noted after the market posted steep declines last week.

Chicago Board of Trade corn for December delivery was up 28 cents at $5.47-1/4 a bushel (all figures US$). The contract found technical support at its 100-day moving average.

CBOT November soybeans were 42-3/4 cents higher at $13.12-1/2 a bushel and broke through their 10-day moving average for the first time in two weeks.

Although weekend rain was heavy in some areas, other spots received just enough to protect the crop for a short amount of time.

“They bought time for crops,” Arlan Suderman, chief commodities economist at StoneX, said in a note to clients “(But) many areas only received enough rain to buy a week to 10 days for crops.”

CBOT soft red winter wheat was up 10-3/4 cents at $6.51-1/2 a bushel.

MGEX spring wheat for September delivery gained 27 cents to $8.35. The front-month contract hit its highest price since May 2013, with traders noting some reports that farmers in the northern Plains were abandoning some drought-damaged acres or cutting crops for hay.

Traders are awaiting key U.S. acreage and stocks data due on Wednesday from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

— Reporting for Reuters by Mark Weinraub in Chicago; additional reporting by Michael Hogan in Hamburg and Naveen Thukral in Singapore.

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The most-active corn contract on the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) ended 20-3/4 cents higher at $6.82-3/4 per bushel, gaining four per cent for the week. New-crop December corn added 25 cents to end at $5.91-1/2.

CBOT soybeans gained 34-1/2 cents to $15.83-3/4 per bushel, increasing 3.48 per cent for the week. New-crop November soybeans added 32 cents to $14.35-1/2.

CBOT wheat gained 11-1/2 cents to $6.87-3/4 per bushel, a 3.65 per cent gain for the week.

Tightening global availability, linked to strong Chinese imports and deteriorating prospects for Brazil’s upcoming corn harvest, have made grain markets sensitive to fluctuating U.S. weather forecasts.

“You’re going to need a record-type yield for both beans and corn. The current forecast is clearly not helpful,” said Terry Roggensack, Agriculture research specialist at Hightower Report.

Private analytics firm IHS Markit Agribusiness lowered its estimate of Brazil’s 2020-21 total corn crop to 88 million tonnes, down fuve million from its previous estimate, according to an IHS client note seen by Reuters.

However, late-planted corn in Argentina, another major exporter, is delivering higher-than-expected yields, the Buenos Aires Grains Exchange said on Thursday.

U.S. corn and soybean yields could be hurt by hot and dry conditions in a year where supply is already slim, said Charlie Sernatinger, Global Head of Grain Futures at ED+F Man Capital.

“It’s not crucial at all for the development of the plant,” he said. “But this is a year when we need a trendline yield in order to break even for new crop ending stocks.”

U.S. corn export sales of 970,500 tonnes gained for the week ended May 27, compared with the prior four weeks, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Corn exports of 2.2 million tonnes were up 15 per cent from the week prior and nine per cent higher than the previous four weeks.

U.S. soybean export sales of 198,000 tonnes were down significantly from the previous four-week average, according to USDA. Exports of 221,700 tonnes were at a marketing-year low.

Parched conditions for U.S. spring wheat contrast with generally favourable conditions for wheat in Europe and the Black Sea region.

U.S. wheat export sales eased to 365,100 tonnes, down from the previous four weeks, according to the USDA. Shipments of 243,200 tonnes were down 56 per cent from the prior four-week average.

— Reporting for Reuters by Christopher Walljasper; additional reporting by Gus Trompiz in Paris and Naveen Thukral in Singapore.

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This forecast period is looking very much like the dog days of summer: plenty of sunshine, lots of heat and a fair bit of humidity. All of this combined will make for good lazing-around weather, but bad working weather, unless of course you like heat and humidity.

When we look at the weather models, the overall weather pattern shows our weather coming out of the southwest. This usually means warm but also unsettled weather. For this forecast period, we will definitely see the heat, but it doesn’t look like things will be too unstable. There will be several areas of weak low and high pressure affecting our region. The trouble with weak systems is that the timing of each system is very difficult to figure out.

With that in mind, we should expect to see an area of low pressure move through every couple of days. Each of these systems will bring partly cloudy skies along with the chance of showers and thundershowers. With all the heat and humidity around, the odd severe thunderstorm cannot be ruled out. There does not look to be much fluctuation in temperatures, with daytime highs ranging from the upper 20s to low 30s and overnight lows dropping only into the mid- to upper teens on most nights, at or above the usual temperature range for this time of the year.

Looking further ahead, the hot humid weather looks to stick around right through until at least the middle of July.

Usual temperature range for this period: Highs, 21 to 30 C; lows, 9 to 16 C.

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He refused water, or any other liquid, while trying to get the harvest done, figuring it would mean fewer stops to answer the call of nature. But it didn’t end well. He landed in hospital with dehydration complicating other pre-existing health problems.

Agricultural health and safety officials tell the story to make the point about what happens if you push yourself too hard.

It’s an important reminder for those headed to the field in this fall’s soaring temperatures, too.

Farmers need to be extra careful they don’t get dehydrated working in this hot weather, and to know what heat exposure can do to their bodies, said Kendra Ulmer, a registered nurse with the Canadian Centre for Health and Safety in Agriculture at the University of Saskatchewan.

There is a real risk of getting overheated working in the kinds of temperatures we’re experiencing, and bursts of physical labour combined with the long hours, fatigue can be a dangerous combination when combined with it, the nurse said.

“Definitely hot weather as a whole is looked at as a workplace hazard,” said Ulmer.

That makes hitting those fields without adequate hydration, and intention to stay that way risky business.

Much of Western Canada remained under a heat wave last week, with daytime temperatures last week in the low to mid-30s, and extreme heat building into western Manitoba, the Red River Valley and parts of northeastern Manitoba.

That’s a dry spell for getting a lot of work done fast, of course, and it can happen while still taking good care of yourself, said Ulmer.

And that means drinking lots and lots of water, she stresses. Small amounts consumed frequently — every 15 or 20 minutes — or a cup of water every half-hour is the recommendation.

“Most farmers do carry water with them, but just make sure you’re taking the time to drink it,” she said. “Don’t wait until you’re thirsty.”

She also recommends loading up on liquids the night before or morning of, and that doesn’t mean coffee or tea to keep weary eyes open.

A balanced diet with a lot of leafy greens and fresh fruit and liquids other than sugary drinks, alcohol or caffeinated drinks is going to keep your energy levels up in a way that means less dependence on caffeine, she said.

Ulmer, who speaks regularly to farm groups about health and wellness strategies, also tells farmers that if they aren’t stopping every hour or so for a pit stop, they’re actually not drinking enough liquid.

Of course, the retort she hears to that is ‘not gonna happen,’ but her counter argument is that frequent breaks are good for lots of other reasons. You’ll stretch your legs, have a moment to check the equipment, and movement helps keep you awake and mentally acute, she said.

“This all works together,” she said. “And if you’re drinking better, and eating well and having snacks through the day, you won’t have the headaches and feeling of tiredness from long hours of work.

“It works much better than caffeine, or other stimulants that you might take for the long hours.”

It’s extremely important to recognize that overexposure to heat can also make you seriously ill, she said.

Heat illnesses are related to the body’s inability to cope with heat and can include heat edema, or swelling of hands, feet, and ankles, a heat rash, heat muscle cramps or fainting. Heat stroke is the most severe heat-related illness and is defined as the body temperature higher than 41.1 C or 106 F and associated with neurological dysfunction.

Know the signs of heat stress, says Ulmer. Typically, it starts with a headache, and you may feel increasingly confused or dizzy.

Those are warning signs. Others include very heavy sweating, muscle cramps and changes in your breathing and a rapid pulse rate. These are serious signals of heat illness coming on, and not to be ignored, she said.

“And when you’re feeling too thirsty, chances are you’re way past dehydration,” she said.

Heat cramps usually occur in the most worked muscles, such as an arm or leg and they can come on suddenly. And if you feel nauseous, it’s not because your tailgate lunch didn’t sit well; nausea and vomiting are other signs heat exhaustion is setting in.

“Heat stroke is a progression of heat exhaustion,” said Ulmer. That’s when you’ll feel weak, or confused, upset or start acting strangely. Hot, dry skin or sweating profusely are other red flags. That’s when you call an ambulance, because a heat stroke can kill someone quickly, she said.

Workers should be checking on each other to help spot these kinds of symptoms, she adds.

Her main message to farmers is to stay well by drinking a lot, and eating well, getting as much quality sleep as possible, and keeping covered out in the sunlight to avoid burning.

In other words, that means caring for one’s health and well-being, even when the focus is more likely to be on heat-stressed crops and livestock, and clock and calendar.

“Farmers are notorious for looking after their land, their animals, their employees, their equipment and their finances and the whole picture,” she said.

“It’s really important that they not forget about taking care of themselves too.”

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