It's harvest time and a Prairie farmer is seeing the impacts of wildfire smoke on her crop production
CBC
Smoke from Alberta's wildfires has farmers worried as the harvest season takes over the Prairies.
Christi Friesen, a grain farmer in the province's Peace region, told CBC's Edmonton AM that smoke has been an ongoing issue over the past few years.
"In 2019, we had pretty bad wildfires up north here that actually blocked out the smoke for a week, and it made our crops stagnant," Friesen said.
"It didn't grow, it didn't mature, it didn't do anything for about a week."
And this year's dry conditions and heavy smoke in the air is making her more cautious in the ever-changing climate.
She said there are patches of green in her canola fields where the plant isn't able to mature properly.
"As the canola plant gets larger they need a lot more sunlight to photosynthesize," she said.
Linda Gorim, an assistant professor at the University of Alberta and the Western Greens Research Foundation Chair in Cropping Systems, said the impact of smoke on crop production really depends on how far the crops are from the smoke.
"Smoke blocking rays from reaching your crop is going to interfere with photosynthesis," Gorim said.
Small openings on leaves called stomata are involved in the process of photosynthesis. Stomata takes in oxygen from the atmosphere and converts it to carbohydrates — which is a way to store the sun's energy as food for the plant to use later.
If light is not available, then photosynthesis will be reduced by up to 50 per cent, said Gorim.
"The only problem with smoke is that smoke is not just carbon dioxide that the plant can use for photosynthesis," she said.
"Most of the time it will also have some volatile organic compounds and these volatile organic compounds would combine with nitrogen dioxide in the air and produce ozone."
Ozone is just as dangerous for plants as it is for humans, Gorim said. If absorbed, ozone can destroy chlorophyll and impact crop production.