Are unrelenting rainy summers the new normal for Ottawa farms?

Greg Longpré, operations manager at Saunders Farm, shows one of the areas where water has accumulated after repeated heavy rains across the Ottawa region since Canada Day. Photo by Ashley Fraser /POSTMEDIA

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Saunders Farm is celebrating its half-century anniversary this year.

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But it’s a milestone that comes with an unexpected twist, according to Mark Saunders.

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In all his years growing up there, since his parents opened the southwest Ottawa farm in 1976, Saunders says he had never seen a summer like this one.

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“Normally this time of year (in August), there’s a little bit of a drought going on, but we have had near rainforest conditions here on the farm,” he says.

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The ground shows it.

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When we visited the farm, my shoes sank into the soaked soil between the carefully planted rows of pumpkins, the mud squelching with every step.

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Saunders says the “deluge” of rain on Canada Day was just one example of an “extremely wet summer.”

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While Saunders Farm hosts events, festivals and various visits as one of the city’s popular agro-tourism destinations, it also grows pumpkins and apple orchards.

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“This amount of rain is not normal for the pumpkins,” Saunders says. As a result, the farm has lost some of that crop this year.

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Greg Longpré, the farm’s operations manager for the past decade, guided us through two of the main pumpkin fields. One of them had noticeable yellowing of leaves, something that Longpré said was a sign of stress for the plant.

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“The yellow (leaves) is due to excessive water,” he said, pointing at pumpkins damaged by the months of heavy rainfall. “What it means is that the pumpkins won’t be as plentiful in these areas where the leaves are turning yellow.”

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The farm’s tile drainage system, which was upgraded five years ago, when the apple orchards were planted, should be helping, Longpré said, but certainly not enough to keep up with the amount of rain in 2026.

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Longpré explained that surface water following a rain event would be filtered down to underground pipes angled to transport the water away from the farm.

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It was a bright sunny day, but drainage outlets were still spilling out water during our visit.

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“In a typical year, we don’t have these issues,” Saunders says. This year, the farm has found it challenging to deal with “this much water, which has been a record amount.”

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“We’ve had a bit of flooding over the years, but it’s pretty rare and it’s normally flash floods from severe rainfall at once. The difference this year is there’s been a lot of those not just one off,” Saunders said.

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Yellow leaves on pumpkin plants at Saunders Farm show demonstrate one of the problems associated with repeated heavy rains in the Ottawa area. Photo by Ashley Fraser /POSTMEDIA

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Why extreme rainfall breaks infrastructure

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Before solutions can be found, Hossein Bonakdari, a civil engineering professor at the University of Ottawa, says communities need to understand what they’re dealing with.

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On farm lands, Bonakdari says a big concern with extreme weather events involving a significant amount of downpour is soil erosion, which he says can affect how plants, farms and agricultural land perform.

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Bonakdari says he is researching the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in developing a software for “real-time monitoring” and short-term flood predictions.