While the excess moisture the Dauphin area has received this spring and early summer has been a nuisance for many, for agricultural producers the impact has been far more significant.
As a result, the Rural Municipality of Dauphin council passed a resolution at its July 9 regular meeting declaring a state of agricultural disaster.
“Just look outside. With the moisture that we’ve had starting prior to Apr. 1, the fact that producers couldn’t finish seeding, the fact that we’re losing crop every day, the fact that there’s a whole bunch of people under undue stress that is caused by all this, we had to make a decision,” Reeve Ernie Sirski said.
“That was the decision we made.”
Sirski said the councils of Mossey River and Gilbert Plains have passed similar resolutions.
“We’re hoping that in conjunction with our sister municipalities . . . we could put some pressure on the provincial and federal governments, saying ‘look, there is a problem here. Let’s try and come to some sort of understanding that we need to do something’,” he said, adding what that “something” is as yet undetermined.
“What’s the something? First of all acknowledging the fact that there is an issue, that’s the first thing. The second one is, is there something that we can do within the existing programs, whether it be AgriInsurance, AgriInvest or AgriStability, to try and help the producers that are affected. The third one is an ad hoc program that government has done in the past to try and alleviate and help the producers that are affected.”
And it is not simply agricultural producers that are impacted, Sirski said, adding municipalities are seeing their budgets take a hit on roads, bridges, culverts and other drainage infrastructure.
“This whole thing goes beyond the producers themselves, the farmers. It goes into what we’ve had to spend as municipalities to try and make sure that people can get to where they’re going,” he said.
In the Dauphin area, total rainfall, according to the Hydrological Forecast Center, is officially recorded as 223 millimetres between Apr. 1 and July 1, approximately 137 per cent of normal. Those numbers do not tell the whole story.
“We had significant snowfalls in March, which people seem to forget about and significant amounts of precipitation,” he said, adding it added up to a late start to the crop year.
“We started the crop and our soil moisture content here locally was full and then we had all this precipitation.”
While it is hard to quantify the extent of the problem across the region, Sirski said it is reasonable to expect that many other producers are experiencing the crop year similar to his operation.
Read the full story in this weeks Dauphin Herald.
