Dale Mainil farms 17,000 acres near Weyburn, Sask., – in the heart of some of the worst flooding seen this year.
“I’m not one to ask for handouts or anything, I don’t think any producer wants to operate that way. But this is a one-in-100 year event and I guess tough times call for measures like this,” he said, referring to the aid package announced last week .
The package offers $30 per acre payments for land that couldn’t be seeded as of June 20, or that was flooded before the end of July.
Read Also
Canada’s plant hardiness zones receive update
The latest update to Canada’s plant hardiness zones and plant hardiness maps was released this summer.
Mainil said the help is welcome.
He was able to seed only about half his acres and to make matters worse, about a third of the crop he did manage to get in the ground was flooded out shortly afterward.
Nonetheless, he considers his farm to be one of the luckier ones in the area, where some barely got a crop in at all.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re big or small, we’re all in the same boat here,” he said.
The federal government announced it will contribute to an aid package for Western Canadian farmers who were unable to seed crops due to this year’s flooding.
At a press conference held on a farm near McTaggart, Sask., federal agriculture minister Gerry Ritz announced that $448 million would be made available through the Agri- Recovery program.
“While farmers know how to deal with difficult weather, the extreme flooding of cropland this year, and year after year, can be devastating. 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,” he said.
Bob Bjornerud, Saskatchewan’s minister of agriculture, was also on hand for the announcement. He said Saskatchewan was home to some 8.5 million of the 13 to 14 million acres that either went unseeded or got flooded.
He said farmers in the province would receive about $250 million in funding, with about 40 percent coming from the province and the rest picked up by the federal government.
For Saskatchewan grain farmers, the minister said $30 per acre payments through the Excess Moisture Program would be in addition to $70 per acre crop insurance payments for a total of $100 per acre to help farmers repair the damage done by this year’s floods and get their land productive again.
Mainil says preparations are well underway on his farm to clean up flooded land for next year.
“We’ll be readyfor spring, hopefully spring will be ready for us,” he said.
