Farmer sees ‘heartbreaking’ losses from flooding

A Miniota-area farmer is hoping to break even this season after 1,500 acres of crops sunk underwater due to flooding.

Trevor Armitage told the Sun that the Assiniboine River crested a dike and flooded out roughly half his total land, destroying the crop of red spring wheat, soybeans and canola.

“My goal is to be somewhere between minus $100,000 and zero dollars. That is my goal for the year,” Armitage said. “It’s by far the most expensive year we’ve ever put a crop in, so I’ve spent the most money I’ve ever spent.”

Armitage grows canola, wheat, soybeans and lentils near Highway 83, with roughly half his farm acres in the Assiniboine Valley. He is looking to crop insurance this year because his four-mile-long dike that runs along the Assiniboine was unable to protect a large area of crops.

“It’s only ever breached that dike two times in the summertime, and that is 2014 and this year,” Armitage said.

“You’d gone, you’d put all the work in, you’d fertilized it, you’d sprayed it, you seeded it. You’ve done the big part of the work, and so to watch it go underwater in July is just completely heartbreaking,” he said. “I go through a range of emotions — anger, right through to sadness.”

The fourth-generation farm may have ended this year had he not recently introduced land on higher ground, he said. Armitage this year rented 1,400 acres near Decker, which is at a safe distance from the flooded Assiniboine.

“My lucky break is that I have that land up top, or I would be done farming this year. This would break me.”

Given good sales prices as well as a good crop from the added acres, he may be able to buffer the losses from the flood — and the new land has come with “unbelievable timing,” he said.

Still, a significant amount of repair work will be needed on his dike, and the remains of trees and silt that washed onto the property will need to be cleaned this fall, he said.

Keith Pearn, a member of the Assiniboine Valley Producers Committee, said he believes between 45,000 and 50,000 farm acres were flooded this year between the Shellmouth Dam and Brandon. The provincial government should provide compensation that reflects the flooding on the farmland in the valley, he said.

“We as producers want to be treated fairly. I think that’s a pretty good way of summing up my thoughts,” he said. “We’re storing water on our land until you can safely get it past Brandon and downstream, and we just feel we should be compensated for that kind of an operation. We’ve been saying that for years.”

Pearn said that valley producers expect to deal with water on their land, but not to the extent that it has been present this year.

“We know we are going to get flooded, but this particular flood is an extended period of time; it’s been going on since April basically,” Pearn said. “There was a few days in there when we thought the flooding was over, and some crops did get seeded. Then the dam had to be cracked wide open again.”

Pearn’s family farm east of Virden has seen about 30 per cent of its farmland flooded this year.

As prolonged flooding continues to be an issue for valley producers, a group is pushing for a separate type of crop insurance that acknowledges the impacts created by the Assiniboine River, he said.

» cmcdowell@brandonsun.com