PONTEIX, Sask. – Companies that sell ammunition in southwestern Saskatchewan are doing a booming business these days.
Gopher populations are higher than people in this region can ever remember. Despite the use of strychnine and guns, the rodents continue to devastate crops and pastures.
In some cases they have taken out entire fields, said farmer and rancher Doug Davidson.
“There are no fields without some damage,” he added. “Some have lost 10 percent of their production to gophers.”
Allan Oliver from nearby Aneroid said he lost more than 200 acres of barley to gophers, formally known as Richardson ground squirrels. He reseeded it and the rodents came back for more.
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“Some fields look like (the crops) never established,” added Hassen Hattum of Cadillac.
Pastures resemble a moonscape, he said. They are difficult to drive through and dangerous for livestock to walk in.
Fall grazing will be virtually non-existent in this area because of gopher damage and drought.
Some ranchers fenced off areas for fall grazing only to have gophers move in and eat it all.
Weeds have grown up where gophers took down crops. In many cases only drought-shortened stalks of empty heads remain. Piles of stalks sit near gopher holes.
Oliver said gophers have become a year-round problem because it didn’t get cold enough last winter for them to stay underground.
“I shot 5,000 rounds during Christmas,” he said.
One of Oliver’s neighbours has shot more than 40,000 rounds trying to get the pests under control.
Hattum said poison doesn’t work and costs too much. Putting out bait three times, at $54 per acre, comes to $162 per acre cost that “just fattens them up.”
Oliver said the 0.4 percent strychnine available on shrunken rye is too weak and unappealing.
“Gophers aren’t stupid,” he said.
If they eat it once and get sick, they simply don’t go back for more.
Previous emergency registrations for stronger fresh strychnine mixes failed to control the population, he said.
