Anxiety rising along with water levels

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/06/2010 (5838 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Into everyone’s life a little rain must fall, but recent heavy rainstorms have left the Canadian Prairies drowning in flood waters.

And that has stress and anxiety levels among farmers rising.

Rains this spring have resulted in the highest unseeded acreage in recent history and an expectation of the largest abandoned acreage in Western Canada since the early 1970s.

Communities and municipalities from across Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta have declared themselves disaster areas due to flooding, and their inability to put seed in the saturated ground.

Estimates show that approximately 8.5 to 12 million acres of Western Canadian farmland will not be seeded this year, due to excess rain and flooding.

In southwestern Manitoba, that translates to between 15 and 30 per cent of the acreage that will likely go unharvested this fall.

And there’s more damage to come if what Manitoba’s senior river forecaster, Alf Warkentin, says is accurate.

The massive storm system that hit Westman one week ago was set to flood the Assiniboine River valley from the Shellmouth Dam to Brandon, with the river cresting by early July.

“The entire valley will get flooded all the way to Brandon,” Warkentin told media last Friday. “That means the valley that is seeded to crops will get flooded.”

Not only do grain and oilseed producers stand to lose millions of dollars in crop revenue from this watery natural disaster, as the Sun reported yesterday, Manitoba’s livestock producers are also concerned as they rely on cereal and green feed crops grown locally.

As a result, the Manitoba Cattle Producers Association wants the province to extend the June 20 crop insurance deadline on cereal crops to July 15, so that grain producers still have time to plant late crops.

“We don’t want to see our producers fighting with other producers from other provinces for feed or other provinces having better support programs to buy feed that puts our guys at a disadvantage,” Manitoba Cattle Producers Association general manager Sheila Mowat told the Sun.

“Having good feed supplies right in our backyard is what our guys need.”

Manitoba Agriculture Minister Stan Struthers has been meeting with his counterparts in Alberta and Saskatchewan, together with federal minister Gerry Ritz, to try to come up with an aid package that will help affected producers through this year.

“There’s a real understanding that farmers are up against a wall on this one and it follows having such high expectations in April,” Struthers said. “… Farmers need to know that our government is in their corner on this one.”

While we are glad to see the minister speak so frankly, the NDP government does not have a perfect track record of offering fair and useful disaster aid to Manitoba producers, especially in our corner of the province.

One of the biggest criticisms farmers and farming institutions have had of federal and provincial programs in recent years is that our politicians often put in place programs that demand stunning amounts of paperwork and time, with little actual benefit to producers.

Or in the case of formerly drought-stricken producers in Westman’s southwest corner, they were refused disaster assistance when they desperately needed it, while feed assistance and forage restoration programs were served up to flooded Interlake producers.

As it stands right now, Keystone Agricultural Producers is also lobbying the government to offer additional programming beyond the existing federal-provincial AgriStability funds.

The most important thing that ministers Struthers and Ritz can do for our producers is to listen to what they need and offer programs that will keep our province treading water with Alberta and Saskatchewan.

The existence of our agricultural sector hangs in the balance.