“Tom, there’s the goat,” exclaimed Michelle with a burst of unexpected happiness as she and her husband showed a visitor her farm’s flood-ravaged yard and adjoining reed-covered pasture.
“I hadn’t expected to see that one again.”
A couple of hundred metres away, a white goat picked its way through the wild growth and new brush that occupies what was once productive land for cows.
The goat is just one of the many things lost by the Teichroeb family in this spring’s massive flooding of Lake Manitoba. Unlike most of the losses, the goat was able to survive during the deluge and walk its way back to the farm months later.
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As four-year-old daughter Regan skips down the road between patches of flooded pasture, the child’s carefree exhibitions might give people the sense that this year’s losses are left behind in the past. But Michelle said she knows the floods continue to haunt the minds of the children.
“This morning when Regan heard a visitor was coming, she asked: ‘Is he coming to talk about the water?’ ” said Michelle.
Their seven-year-old, Madison, also hit them with a statement recently that gave the couple a tough time explaining why they choose to live on a farm.
“She said she wanted to live in the city because there wasn’t water everywhere,” said Michelle.
“And the only place in the city where there’s water is in the swimming pool.”
Tom said: “And the dike. She said in the city you could walk and play everywhere and you didn’t have a big dike in the way.”
Michelle said: “That was hard for us to hear.”
For the Teichroebs, living on a farm is a choice. Eleven years ago, they were living in Alberta with Tom working in the oil patch and Michelle working as a draftsperson for an architect. However, they both grew up in the country and wanted to farm for a living, so with land so expensive in Alberta and cheap in Manitoba, they moved east in 2002. They bought a native pasture and a parcel of assorted cattle land along the shores of Lake Manitoba.
It’s been good cattle country and a good place to work and raise a family, until this year. Tom has built a herd of 300 cows and backgrounds 225 yearlings. Michelle works at the local school in Langruth as a teacher’s aide, continues to work as a draftsperson for the firm in Alberta and works at local design jobs, using the internet.
But this year everything went bad. The soils were saturated and Lake Manitoba’s level was high going into last winter. Tom knew the situation was bad when the wells were flowing over in February.
Then the Assiniboine River began flooding upstream of Portage la Prairie in May, provoking the government to reroute huge amounts of water out of the river into the Portage Diversion and up a few kilometres north to Lake Manitoba, where the water would never normally go.
The land had been draining nicely, but once the lake’s level began rising, trouble arrived. A windstorm caused lake water to slosh miles inland, with huge amounts of water inundating the cattle country that surrounds the lake.
The Teichroebs’ farmyard began to resemble an island, as water flooded pastures and covered the roads. Every day, Tom would drive Michelle and the girls to town along submerged roads, with red flags on each side showing where the drop-off began.
Then he’d rush home to try to do what he’d been desperately attempting: to keep his cows and calves alive and get them to safety.
With much of the land literally under water, and the cattle on ridges and high points, getting them to dry land was imperative. Tom, with the assistance of neighbours and truckers, eventually managed to get his cow-calf pairs and yearlings to pastures scattered in a 60 kilometre radius.
But it was an odyssey, filled with anxiety, fear and losses. In the first days, Tom had to trail the cows and calves 10 km across saturated ground to a safer place where they could be held until new pastures were arranged.
Two of the old cows got stuck in the mud and had to be shot in the field to end their suffering. The other cows were in the middle of calving, so moving them caused both the cows and the calves distress at the worst possible time.
“Two-day-old calves don’t travel real well,” said Tom. “It took us a long, long time to get there.”
As days turned into weeks, the Teichroebs got accustomed to driving through water and spending a lot of time checking the cattle scattered across the region.
“Madison said she didn’t want me to go away so much,” said Tom.
Farmers in the area don’t know what to do now that the flood has receded. Fields that were pastures are covered with reeds that won’t be easy to replace with grass. Farmers have suffered such big losses some will have to leave farming, and others won’t be able to retire.
Tom said everyone needs compensation to rehabilitate the land, cover losses and get back to business. Farmers deserve the money, because the lake was intentionally flooded by the government, but locals are skeptical that compensation will cover anywhere near the losses suffered.
“I’ve never been in the self-pity boat, but I definitely am in the compensate-me-for-what-you-did-tome boat,” said Tom.
Tom’s cattle operation has taken a beating, with cows and calves suffering during calving, with slow growth, with possible problems rebreeding -and also financially, with Tom having to rent land and buy feed for animals he thought he could support.
But even though Michelle has two non-farm streams of income, they won’t use them to make up cattle losses.
“I have always made a commitment that I would never, and I won’t, use any income that Michelle has off her business to supplement the cows,” said Tom.
“If her income has to be linked to my business, it means it’s not viable.”
Tom and Michelle said they intend to keep living on the farm and to keep involved with the cattle industry, but they don’t know if they could take another flood like this.
And they hope that soon the flood fades to a memory for their girls, and what they’ll remember about the farm when they grow up is the stars at night -clearer than in the city -and the beauty of the country once the waters have sunk, the reeds are chopped down, and the dike no longer gets in the way of playing.
