Farmers battling a gopher plague in southwestern Saskatchewan are hoping that a one year emergency registration for the use of two-percent strychnine in poison baits will turn the tide in their war against the destructive varmints.
Allan Oliver, reeve of the Rural Municipality of Auvergne, said local ranchers and grain farmers have been waiting five years for permission from the Pesticide Management Regulation Agency to increase the strychnine content in gopher poison, which was previously capped at 0.4 percent.
“We can start poisoning this fall now, and then hit them right off the bat in February and March,” said Oliver, who farms 16 quarters of hay, pasture and cropland near Aneroid, Sask.
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“The problem with the 0.4 percent was that unless they ate a lot of it, they didn’t die.”
The scale of the devastation is mind-boggling, he said.
This year, he had 209 acres written off by crop insurance due to damage by the voracious, tunneling rodents, formally known as Richardson’s ground squirrels. One neighbour near Ponteix had to write off 850 acres due to crop damage, he added.
“It’s not only being eaten up but it’s being destroyed by them digging holes. Then our friendly badgers move in and make the holes bigger. We’ve had to break up good alfalfa ground because you couldn’t get the machinery over it,” he said.
Under the exemption, farmers will also be able to mix their own poison baits using various grains and the two-percent strychnine concentrate, which has been off the market for 15 years. Previously, they were forced to use only one kind of ready-mixed bait that the surviving gophers learned to avoid.
Use of the poison will continue to be strictly controlled, he added, with detailed records kept by RMs.
Poison is a weapon of last resort, Oliver added. Even an army of volunteer hunters hasn’t made a dent in the gopher population. Two local Co-op stores have sold more than seven million rounds of ammunition since the outbreak began about seven years ago.
“It is totally unimaginable how many rounds of ammunition have been fired and how many dead gophers there are,” said Oliver. “But they just seem to keep coming back two or three days later.”
