It is official, Barrhead County council declared a state of agricultural disaster on Tuesday, Aug. 4, during their regular meeting, citing data compiled by the Agriculture Financial Services Corporation (AFSC) and studies done on members of the council’s own time.
Glen Snethun, a representative of the AFSC told council that over the last 18 days, from July 17 to Aug. 4, according to the data that has been collected, the province is seeing a return to normal conditions, though within the County of Barrhead, for 2015, the majority of precipitation and soil moisture remains fairly poor. While satellite imagery does not go north far enough to show accurately what is going on in the county of Barrhead, but for crops, the data is for comparison on a year-by-year basis.
“Poor is poor,” Snethun said. “I can’t actually give you a definition of what that means, of the stats that were used, but every week the office of the AFSC gets their data, and their reports are based on opinions of that material. If they say it is poor, it’s got to be pretty bad.”
Doris Schwab, another representative for AFSC said that the insurance adjusters do a monthly crop report of what they are seeing in the area.
Coun. Dennis Nanninga said that council took it upon themselves last week to do a tour of the county, adding that in his opinion, things are indeed bad.
“We talked to a gentleman who said off a crop on sixty acres, last year he had 168 bales, and this year, off the same sixty acres, he got 37 so that’s what poor means to me,” he said.
“I did a circle around the province myself, and it’s spotty everywhere,” Snethun said. “The biggest crop issue is cattle feed and people are concerned, but I don’t think anyone should panic at this point in time, until this season is done and you’ve gotten your final payments.”
Agriculture Recovery, a Growing Forward II initiative, is a framework designed to allow the federal and provincial governments to jointly examine agricultural disasters, to determine impact, current program response and if additional assistance is required. It does not cover losses that are insurable or covered by other programs, and according to Snethun, Alberta has no budget allocated for agriculture recovery initiatives.
“When we saw that this could be a potential problem, we put what we call a Dry Conditions team together and what that is is coordinating communications and scenario planning, examining potential solutions,” Snethun said. “What that means is, we took the worst case scenario and planned our strategies around that because we did not want the change to hit midstream.”
“When we went and looked, the crops were 80 per cent poor,” coun. Bill Lane said. “That includes the crops, the pastures, but I thought we were just going to do a partial declaration.” A lot depends on the spottiness of rainfall, Mark Oberg, county manager said, adding that it is now a declaration for the whole county but people should realize that there are percentages involved. “Not everybody is having a disaster, but a whole lot of people are.”
“It’s like a tornado going through town,” Reeve Bill Lee said. “Some homes are left standing, some aren’t.” According to Lee, even with increased rainfall, with pastures the way they are now, its going to be tough on cattle.
Updates and bulletins are posted to the AFSC website, which you can visit at www.afsc.ca
