Old friends are the best friends and last week we enjoyed some time with friends of long standing who we hadn’t seen in some time.
In the early evening, we stood on the grass in front of their house, a soft breeze blowing, the dog scampering and the cat waiting for her ears to be scratched.
Through the trees, we watched the sun going down while waves lapped gently on the shore, ducks swam and frogs chirped.
A ideal evening at the lake.
Read Also
Agriculture needs to prepare for government spending cuts
As government makes necessary cuts to spending, what can be reduced or restructured in the budgets for agriculture?
The trouble was, we weren’t at the lake.
We were on the front yard of our friends’ farm home. Where the waves lapped and the ducks swam, a spring-seeded crop should have been growing.
We spent three days in southeastern Saskatchewan last week and saw many such scenes.
Fields under water. Where there wasn’t water there was often mud, and summerfallow fields overgrown and going to seed.
At one point, driving along the highway from Weyburn to Estevan, I stopped to watch some horses grazing on grass sticking up through the water. The horses were knee-deep in water.
We missed ag minister Vanclief’s aid announcement in Estevan, but we heard a lot about it and what it will or, more often won’t, do for farmers in the area.
Vanclief’s visit was a disappointment in many ways.
Rightly or wrongly, with the minister returning to southeastern Saskatchewan and southwestern Manitoba so soon after his visit to tour the area to see the flood damage for himself, farmers expected substantial aid. New money.
Instead, Vanclief just, in the words of one farmer, “came to tell us how he was going to recycle our own money.”
He announced lower Net Income Stabilization Account triggers and said that farmers could get their 60 percent of their 1999 Agricultural Income Disaster Assistance money early.
This is supposed to free up about $10 million for farmers in the affected area of Saskatchewan.
It sounds like a lot of money, but the fact is that farmers there are facing their third year of difficulties and many NISA accounts don’t have a lot left in them.
The money has already been spent on survival. And, while the AIDA advance sounds good, we must remember that AIDA payouts are based on 70 percent of the previous three-year average.
If incomes haven’t been good for two of those three years, 70 percent of little is less, and 60 percent of 70 percent won’t amount to much.
Difficulties point to the need for a long- term program of support for farmers in times of difficulties such as drought and flood. That such a program has been a long time coming and is nowhere near to being in place is no credit to either our federal or our provincial politicians.
