Another ‘harvest from hell’: Canada’s farmers forced to acclimatize to weird weather

Dec 03, 2019

Late this summer, at least 12 counties in Manitoba declared a “state of agricultural emergency.” It was too dry.

In November, two Alberta counties declared “municipal agriculture disasters.” It was too wet.

And they weren’t the first in the province to point out the difficulties farmers are facing this year.

Persistent wet weather in the Leduc area prompted the local government there to declare an agricultural disaster in September. In August, Lac Ste. Anne county, northwest of Edmonton, declared a state of agricultural disaster for the second year in a row.

In Grande Prairie, which declared an agricultural disaster in early November, county officials said in a press release that between 40 and 60 per cent of crops were still in the fields. Early snowfall, they added, was “ending any chance of increasing the figures this season.”

This sort of volatility in weather is only expected to increase, according to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. The federal government agency warns on its website that droughts, floods and violent storms are all predicted to increase in frequency as a result of climate change.

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Video: Cleaning Sheep Barns & Setting Up Chutes

Indoor sheep farming in winter at pre-lambing time requires that, at Ewetopia Farms, we need to clean out the barns and manure in order to keep the sheep pens clean, dry and fresh for the pregnant ewes to stay healthy while indoors in confinement. In today’s vlog, we put fresh bedding into all of the barns and we remove manure from the first groups of ewes due to lamb so that they are all ready for lambs being born in the next few days. Also, in preparation for lambing, we moved one of the sorting chutes to the Coveralls with the replacement ewe lambs. This allows us to do sorting and vaccines more easily with them while the barnyard is snow covered and hard to move sheep safely around in. Additionally, it frees up space for the second groups of pregnant ewes where the chute was initially.