AGRICULTURAL DISTASTER: Rain making it hard for Dauphin area farmers to keep heads above water

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Dauphin-area farmers “drowning” in precipitation are sounding the alarm as crops are depleted and massive financial losses are on the horizon.

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“At this point, we are talking about a dire situation,” Ernie Sirski said over the phone from his family farm in the RM of Dauphin, where his family farms on approximately 6,000 acres.

“We’re talking thousands of acres that aren’t seeded in Dauphin and that is dollars that won’t be collected, and with the continued excess water, we are also seeing crops that were planted being destroyed.”

Sirski, who has farmed in the area for decades, and currently serves as the Reeve of the RM of Dauphin, said that in his role as reeve he has been getting calls daily and often multiple times per day from farmers telling him this is one of the most challenging growing seasons they have ever seen, and that they are struggling.

“It’s daily that I’ll get a call and someone will tell me ‘I just wrote off another 100 acres,’” he said. “So what I am seeing on my farm would be similar to what most out here are seeing.”

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He said the losses for some farmers in the area could be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and collectively this growing season will likely be in the millions for Dauphin-area farmers.

During their last council meeting, Dauphin council passed a resolution to call a “state of agricultural disaster,” and that remains in place as of this week, while the neighbouring municipalities of Mossey River and Gilbert Plains passed similar resolutions in recent weeks.

Although the resolution does not give those councils any additional money to support farmers, Sirski said it does allow them to lobby both the federal and provincial governments and he said council is working with other municipalities to draft a letter that will be sent to both levels of government.

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“This is a joining together with sister municipalities so that we can go forward and lobby our governments federally and provincially, and explain to them we do have a very serious situation that should be addressed.

“It is costing people collectively in the millions and we need to figure out how we are going to deal with it.”

Issues with excess moisture in the area first began in March, when multiple snowstorms hit and left precipitation that did not run off, because of the amount of moisture that was already in the ground.

He says that was followed by unusually rainy weather this spring that compounded the problem.

“We started to get the rains, and really once we hit May it just didn’t stop,” he said. “It never let up.”

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According to the Hydrological Forecast Center, the Dauphin area received total precipitation of 223 millimetres between April 1 and July 1, but when you include weather events before April including multiple snowstorms, Sirski and he and many other farmers in the area estimate they have received more than 400 millimetres of precipitation since the start of the calendar year.

And while he said farmers work to mitigate their losses in a tough growing season, sometimes the weather is so uncooperative that those losses become inevitable.

“This is about as bad as it gets,” Sirski said. “And sadly sometimes you can only do so much and throw up your hands and say, ‘there is nothing else I can do.’”

Any agricultural producer or family member that feels they need support or someone to talk to can access a variety of mental health services and resources though the not-for-profit Manitoba Farmer Wellness program at manitobafarmerwellness.ca, or can contact the Manitoba Farm Rural and Support Services program by contacting 1-866-367-3276.

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