Photo: The Canadian Press

WINNIPEG — More Manitoba residents saw their electricity restored Thursday—one week after a major snowstorm brought down power poles and transmission towers and delivered another wallop to farmers.

Manitoba Hydro said some 6,500 homes and businesses remained without power, down from 9,000 Wednesday and 53,000 on Saturday. Most of the remaining outages are in rural areas and First Nations communities in central Manitoba and the Interlake region to the north.

The storm started last Thursday and dumped up to 100 millimetres of rain and snow across a wide swath of the province. Previous wet weather had already saturated the ground, and the storm brought a further halt to fall harvest in many areas.

“We are in emergency mode to get the crops off,” said Bill Campbell, president of Keystone Agricultural Producers of Manitoba, the province’s largest farm group.

“It is absolutely a mess out here, and we are really struggling with mental health and how to cope with this.”

The Manitoba government said more than half of flax, soybean and corn crops had yet to be harvested—a level well below the average over the previous three years.

With a hard frost and winter looming, Campbell said many producers are uncertain as to how much of their crops they’ll be able to get to.

“I haven’t spoken to anybody yet that has got less than a quarter-million dollars laying out on the ground. Lots of guys are at half a million,” Campbell said.

“I don’t know what will become of this scenario if we don’t get some really good weather and some favourable government intervention.”