MELITA, Man. — The fields below the aircraft are ugly.
Pools of water pockmark many of them, plains of water form new lakes, flushes of yellow reveal rank volunteer canola crops and old tractor lines show how farmers farmed last year.
It’s a collection of farmer horrors that is particularly bad around Melita and anywhere near the Souris and Assiniboine river valleys. However, similar situations occur across much of Manitoba and southeastern Saskatchewan.
“Holy mackerel, look at how wide that is,” said Keystone Agricultural Producers president Doug Chorney as the small airplane passed over the swollen Souris River June 21.
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It was a week before the crest from the Saskatchewan storm and flooding from Minot, North Dakota, was set to hit Melita.
While the flooded valleys and low-lying areas beside the rivers looked bad, the sights that worried Chorney most were those of fields that had obviously not been worked this year.
From the Red River to Melita to Reston to Dauphin to Arborg, thousands of quarter sections had clearly not been seeded, sprayed or tilled, and the amount of water lying on fields made it seem obvious that those fields would not be seeded this year.
“Most of this won’t dry this summer,” said Chorney, who organized the flight to reveal the vast extent of unseeded land.
The flooded homes and businesses of people along the Assiniboine and Souris rivers and the water-damaged homes, farms and cottages around Lake Manitoba have received much of the media attention in Manitoba, but KAP has worried that urban residents don’t realize the significance of the seeding disaster. It also doesn’t think urban residents realize how important the farm economy is to Manitoba’s cities and towns. Chorney estimates farmers could lose $1 billion because they are unable to seed.
The multiplier effect of farmers’ problems has also been worrying Graham Starmer, president of the Manitoba Chambers of Commerce.
He has heard alarming reports from his organization’s 70 local chambers of commerce and thinks most Manitobans don’t realize how important non-farm agri-businesses are within the provincial economy. “There’s going to be a huge financial burden,” Starmer said about the impact on input dealers, equipment dealers and farm service providers.
“There’s no compensation for them at all.”
Starmer said reports from every corner of the province tell the same story, and “it doesn’t look good.
