Crop Comments

One Last Dose (Hopefully) of Canadian Wildfires The record wildfires of 2023 (compliments of our neighbor to the North) started gaining momentum in March of that year. Their intensity increased, starting in June, but Canada had been affected by an ongoing, record-setting series of wildfires. As the worst wildfire season in recorded Canadian and North American history, Big Burn 2023 surpassed the record held by the 2020 California wildfires. On June 6 of that year, I was traveling through southern Madison County in New York during what was later officially declared by climatologists to be the peak of the Canadian wildfire smog inundation for the Northeast region. Listening to news reports that night, I learned that a lot of other things besides timber were being incinerated in Canada. Some of those things’ emissions were serious pollutants which medical professionals advised babies and old folks not to inhale.