WINNIPEG – While members of Keystone Agricultural Producers at last week’s annual meeting debated transportation issues, one delegate was having transportation problems of a different kind.
Chuck Stienwandt was up to mid-thigh in snow, shoveling it off the newly concave roof of his quonset that houses machinery for his grains and oilseeds operation southwest of Grandview.
At least eight farm buildings in the Parkland region were damaged by a huge dump of wet snow.
Ray Clyde of the Dauphin weather office said the region received 34 centimetres of snow on Sunday and Monday last week. By the end of the week, another 17 centimetres had fallen.
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Clyde said it was the most snowfall the region had received in one day in at least 20 years. A warm weather system moved into the area and hung over a narrow swath from Esterhazy, Sask., to Lake Manitoba for five days.
Stienwandt said he was “desperate” to get to Winnipeg for the KAP conference, but he couldn’t even reach a provincial highway about 2.5 kilometres away.
The next morning a neighbor called to report a quonset, normally shaped like a rainbow, looked a little flat. The building is about four kilometres from Stienwandt’s home.
The roof of the quonset, which is 33 by 14.5 metres, had collapsed in the centre lengthways nearly all the way down. Luckily, the roof sagged onto several pieces of tall, sturdy machinery: tractor cabs, wood extensions on the box of a grain truck and a vertical grain dryer.
This protected other machinery from damage, and kept the roof from falling to the floor.
Stienwandt plans to repair the building himself.
“I had a lot of pride in that big implement shed.”
He said it now looks like a pile of junk, but there’s no use crying over it.
“There’s a lot of things that happen on the farm that we have no control over, and if you let every little thing bother you, you’ll be no good for anything.”
