Hay is still flowing east from the Prairies, even after the surge of donated forage from the Hay East program finished moving across the Canadian Shield.
Prairie farmers are now selling hay to Ontario farmers, keeping alive connections that were made in the fall.
“That pipeline is still there,” Agricultural Producers of Saskatchewan vice-president Todd Lewis said during Keystone Agricultural Producers’ annual meeting.
Subsidies and other forms of support are still helping pay the high price of hauling bulky bales far further than hay would ever normally be hauled, but prairie farmers are now treating Ontario as another available market for prairie forages.
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Lewis said in an interview that the hay sales need the transportation subsidies to be viable, but the biggest asset underlying the new market is the network of truckers who are now experienced in hauling hay west to east.
“There’s a whole infrastructure that can get hay loaded in Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba and head east, and that still exists,” said Lewis.
“Nobody has to phone a bunch of people to get transportation out there.”
Lewis thinks prairie farmers donated nearly 200 loads of hay during the Hay East program to help drought-stricken Ontario farmers who faced a dangerous situation going into winter.
Many farmers in Ontario worried they would have to sell parts of their herds because they couldn’t find enough hay for the winter.
Fortunately, the Prairies had a good crop of hay. A combination of farmer donations, government programs and private company support made a “small dent” in Ontario’s estimated need for 50,000 bales.
Lewis said the donations and sales to Ontario farmers, as well as big purchases of prairie hay from drought-stricken U.S. farmers who also received transportation subsidies, resulted in Saskatchewan “basically being cleaned out of hay this winter.”
He said many prairie farmers were happy to donate to Ontario farmers, even in a hot market for hay, because they remembered help from the East during earlier droughts.
