For more than a century people have raised cattle around the shores of Lake Manitoba, carefully stewarding the fragile shoreline lands, the native pastures and the hay land that have provided a stable basis for a ranching community.
But that life and economy, stable for more than a century, began to erode in 2006, local people say, when water levels on the lake began to rise and were kept higher than the historical norm year after year.
This became a crisis in 2011 when epic flooding of the Assiniboine river caused the provincial government to redirect massive amount of water north out of the river and into the lake. The outflow channel at the other end of the lake wasn’t and isn’t able to take out as much as was being put in, so the result was water spreading miles beyond its shores, across tens of thousands of acres.
Ranchers scrambled as water rose in 2011 to get their cattle out, scattering their animals far and wide across Manitoba to wherever they could find pasture to rent. For the animals they were able to keep home they had to bring in hay and other feed, something they had to do in 2012 as well as 2011. The flooding, which left water over the pastures and hay fields for more than eight months, killed most of the grasses and their productive capacity was severely compromised until they could recover.
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In 2013 they began to recover and ranchers looked forward to 2014 being a “normal” year again.
Then the enormous rainstorm at the end of June and beginning of July flooded the Assiniboine again, and the Portage Diversion was once again opened up full force – and Lake Manitoba levels surged again.
With so much water being poured into the lake, something needs to be able to take that water back out of the lake if devastating flooding is to be avoided in the future. That’s the only hope the ranching community has to continue farming along the low lands that until 2006 had provided a stable environment for their ancient occupation.
And that’s something the Manitoba government is planning to do: build a much bigger outflow channel to take water out of the lake and stop flooding hitting extreme levels like in 2011. Will it work? Will it protect the pastures, shores and farmland that ranchers rely upon, or just protect residential homes and cottages in the communities around the lake? That’s what the ranchers are wondering.
To see a feature from our newspaper about this situation, go here.
