Early harvest a balancing act for Lumsden farmer and beekeeper

For Josef Buttigieg, running a mixed-operation farm is a balancing act.

“We’re trying to keep on top of all different sort of moving parts,” Buttigieg said.

“Now maybe I’m a little crazy in that sense, because we are doing several different types of farming all at the same time, so it does make it more complicated.”

The owner of Fenek Farms, located 25 kilometres north of Regina, is responsible for getting the crop in the bin, extracting honey from his beehives, and keeping all the animals fed and watered.

He said his agenda for any given day can often be interrupted when “something goes sideways.”

Buttigieg said he expects this year’s crop to be in the bin by the end of August. Harvest is slightly ahead of schedule across the province, according to the Ministry of Agriculture’s most recent weekly crop report.

Buttigieg said the wet spring followed by intense summer heat caused his crops to ripen more quickly than usual.

“We are significantly early, at least in our region over here,” he said.

Many of Buttigieg’s crops are used as feed for his animals, and he said the rain that fell in June has left things in good shape.

“They are looking good in comparison to previous years,” Buttigieg said. “Especially for hay. In our area last year, hay was extremely poor. This year is significantly better.”

Buttigieg said he needs about 400,000 pounds of hay to provide for his animals over the winter months.

With poor feed crops last year, Buttigieg got creative and collected Jack-o-lanterns left over from Halloween to use as feed.

While Buttigieg said he never knows what grain payouts will look like until the crop’s in the bin, he thinks prices will be “OK” for him this year.

With Buttigieg’s mixed operation, he said he occasionally has had to drop everything to run to catch a swarming beehive.

The 14 different hives at his farm require harvesting every two weeks throughout the summer months. The entire process of extracting the honey takes around six hours.

While the crops are looking promising this year, Buttigieg said it has been a tough year for bee colony losses.

“In the spring we lost a whole whack-load of hives, unfortunately,” he said. “But that’s probably what we are attributing it just to – the erratic winter that we had.”

Eight of Buttigieg’s hives died, he said, pushing colony losses over 50 percent.

But Buttigieg said the payoff is pretty sweet, as each year he harvests about 1,100 pounds of honey.