The Manitoba government was slammed last week over the issue of leafy spurge, a noxious weed that continues to spread and strangle pastures, hay fields and wildlife areas in the province.
During the annual provincial grazing tour, a visit was made to a research plot east of Brandon where methods for controlling the weed were reviewed. One of the people involved in the research said the demonstrations were put together on a “shoestring” and that the province is doing nothing to combat leafy spurge.
“I think it should be an election issue,” said Karen Rempel, co-ordinator of a spurge management project for the Prairies and a research affiliate with Brandon University’s Rural Development Institute. “They don’t do anything for leafy spurge and I think we should be really angry.”
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But the province countered those sentiments with information gathered by its communications staff. According to that information, 29 projects specifically related to leafy spurge received funding of more than $167,000 from Manitoba Agriculture’s Covering New Ground program from 1998 to 2005. That included $20,500 last year for the Leafy Spurge Stakeholders Group to help establish and sustain integrated pest management plans for the weed.
Leafy spurge is native to Europe. It arrived in the United States in 1827 as a contaminant in grain seed and eventually extended into the Canadian Prairies.
It is an aggressive weed that has been dubbed the silent invader. It affects about 700,000 acres of land in Manitoba, according to Rempel. That’s double the estimated number of acres affected in the late 1990s.
The weed is tenacious and difficult to control. It can cause the carrying capacity of pastures to plummet and its presence can drive down the value of farmland.
Cattle and horses shy from eating it because it can give them sore mouths and digestive upset. Goats and sheep are more tolerant, but there are limits on how much they can eat.
“You will never, in my estimation, get rid of leafy spurge,” said Rempel, who instead encouraged producers to think about an integrated approach to controlling the weed. “It’s going to be a real issue over time and something we all need to be aware of.”
She said Saskatchewan and Alberta are “light years” ahead in their efforts to control the weed. In Manitoba, the responsibility for controlling noxious weeds tends to fall to the municipalities, which do not always have money to spray places such as ditches for weeds.
