PRINCE GEORGE, B.C. – Agriculture Canada wants to recruit more weather watchers among British Columbia farmers.
The department’s climate information service monitors the impacts of drought and flood so that better decisions can be made for crop insurance and income tax deferral programs.
It uses information from farmer operated weather stations on the Prairies and in B.C.’s Peace district but needs more stations in the rest of B.C.
“There are very few stations in B.C. that are representative of your farms,” Trevor Hadwen of Agriculture Canada told the recent B.C. Cattlemen’s Association convention in Prince George.
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The government has responded to significant drought in B.C.’s interior by granting livestock producers federal tax deferrals four times in the last six years as producers downsize due to lack of feed
However, Hadwen said the B.C. data is not as good as Agriculture Canada would like because there are not enough weather stations to record local conditions.
“In 2006, the livestock drought assistance program was very widely targeted and probably incorrectly targeted,” he said.
Inadequate regional information resulted in some producers with good hay crops receiving payouts and some with failures not qualifying.
“We quite often struggle with B.C. because of the lack of information,” he said.
The department also wants to add more people to its list of more than 325 producers who provide regular updates on surface water supplies and forage production.
Surface water surveys assess how much water is available in sloughs, ponds and dugouts. Falling surface water levels are a good early indicator of drought.
District government offices collect information from producers on a regular basis and post it on the government website. They want to recruit B.C. producers to participate so they can start collecting data this year.
District offices need five to six reports throughout the season to assess whether droughts or floods may trigger a tax deferral in a region.
They also want to study the impacts of extreme weather and larger trends in different regions to build better early warning systems and plan for possible aid programs.
“Knowing how much rain there is doesn’t necessarily tell us how much impact there is,” he said.
Doug Edwards, a regional water engineer with Agriculture Canada, said more farm weather stations are needed in the province than the current 79.
The information is fed into the B.C. Farmwest weather station system, which provides climate information to farmers and irrigators.
For information, visit www.farm-west.ca and www.agr.gc.ca/drought.
