MCTAGGART, Sask. — In 40 years of farming, Jim Vogt says he’s never seen a season like this one where land has been too wet to seed and what is seeded has been washed away.
“There were so many different things that happened. It was just unreal,” the Saskatchewan producer said Thursday after an aid announcement by agriculture officials.
Vogt and other Prairie farmers are to receive $448 million to help cope with flood damage. Ottawa and the three provincial governments say farmers will get $30 an acre — that’s $74 a hectare — for land that couldn’t be seeded by June 20, or which was seeded but then flooded by the end of July.
Vogt was able to get about 1,200 hectares of peas, lentils and canola into the ground on his 1,800-hectare farm in Odessa, southeast of Regina. The last five or six fields went well, he said, until heavy rain from a June storm washed out about one-fifth of what he’d planted.
“It was just too wet,” said Vogt.
“It was a battle to get that many acres in, getting stuck and going around water. It was quite the job to try and get something seeded this year. It was just constant rain.”
The Saskatchewan Watershed Authority issued warnings months ago that said there was a high likelihood of flooding from spring runoff, especially in the southern half of the province. Heavy rains then battered many areas and raised water levels more.
Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz said farmers are facing challenges.
“While farmers know how to deal with difficult weather, the extreme flooding of crop land this year and year after year can be devastating,” he said while visiting a farm in McTaggart, Sask.
“It’s safe to say that it’s been a remarkably tough year for farmers in the areas of the western provinces that have been affected. Extreme weather and flooding is once again hampering farm production on the Prairies.”
Ritz said 5.6 million hectares may be affected across the Prairies.
“As things stand now, pastures and crop land damaged by floods over the past 12 months will need some time, in fact years in some cases, to rejuvenate,” said Ritz.
It was just over a year ago when Ritz and the three Prairie governments announced plans to pump an additional $450 million into a program to cover flooded farmland. Near non-stop rain in the spring and early summer of 2010 turned many fields into lakes, especially in east-central Saskatchewan.
At the time, politicians and farmers said the devastation was the worst they’d seen in decades.
But Manitoba’s largest farm organization said the situation may be worse this year.
“I went on Tuesday to Portage la Prairie, and I was driving north of Eli, and there are still acres and acres of land that are completely under water,” said Doug Chorney, president of Keystone Agricultural Producers, known as KAP. “I was looking at thousand of acres of land along the highway under water with no ground to be seen, let alone to spray or cultivate it.”
He has said losses from this spring’s flood could cost the economy about $3 billion.
The hardest hit provinces — Saskatchewan and Manitoba — are getting most of the money. Alberta will get about $21 million.