By Kevin Ma
County council has declared a state of emergency over the state of the county's farms.
Sturgeon County council voted unanimously Monday morning to declare a local state of agricultural disaster due to drought and weather conditions in the county.
Parkland and MacKenzie counties made similar declarations earlier this summer. Leduc County was expected to do the same Tuesday.
The vote was a symbolic move meant to alert provincial and federal officials to the problems local farmers now face due to dry conditions, said county Mayor Tom Flynn, shortly after the motion passed.
Rain levels so far this growing season were at their lowest in more than 50 years in much of the west side of Sturgeon County and at 12-to-50-year lows in the rest of the region, reports Alberta Agriculture's AgroClimatic Information Service.
Hay producers have been particularly hard hit, with crop yields at about 25 per cent of normal, Flynn said. Farmers are reporting that the price of a bale of hay has roughly tripled since the start of the year, and some may have to sell their herds as a result.
"Our producers are at risk here."
Farmpocalypse? Not quite
Farmer Rhonda Mulligan said conditions were pretty bad around her farm near Morinville. They've had about 3.3 inches of rain all season – about half the five to seven they usually get.
"The crops are certainly a bit sparse this year," she said, but the peas are OK, and they'll definitely have something to harvest.
"I don't know about declaring a state of emergency, but this would be pretty close."
From 12 to 18 per cent of the grain and pea crops in the North West region of the province (which includes the Edmonton region) were in good to excellent condition as of July 14, reports Alberta Agriculture. About 98 per cent of all pasture lands were in fair to poor condition.
Sturgeon County seems to be better off than Parkland right now due to its better soil and the snow dump it got back on May 5 (the date of the provincial election), said André Montpetit of Sturgeon Valley Fertilizer. While cattle producers were definitely nervous due to a shortage of good pasture and hay, most everyone else was greasing up their combines in preparation to harvest.
"Definitely we're looking at a below-average year, but that's farming. They're not always going to be bumper crops every single year."
Farm conditions are extremely variable right now based on where the rains fall, said Barrhead-Morinville-Westlock MLA Glenn van Dijiken. He was most concerned about livestock producers, as insurance programs would not cover their high feed prices. If they have to sell their herds, it could affect the economics of the entire cattle industry.
"For now, everyone's guardedly hoping for more rain."
Flynn said he hoped the federal and provincial governments would step in to help local farmers. That could mean giving farmers who sell their herds this year with the intention to reinvest in them later a tax break, for example, or shipping hay bales west into Alberta.
Ad-hoc supports often have unintended consequences, van Dijiken said. Shipping hay west can spread crop diseases, for example (which happened the last time there was a big hay program), and is often more expensive than shipping cows east to hay.
Declarations like the one issued by Sturgeon County were the first step toward federal and provincial action, van Dijiken said.
But as the province didn't seemed poised to bring in any new initiatives, he's been telling farmers to plan around the supports they have now.
"They shouldn't be expecting anything extra."
The last time the county declared a state of agricultural disaster was June 25, 2009.
