‘Once in a lifetime event’: Manitoba farmers say storm damage will devastate this year’s crop

Jul 01, 2026

Nearly a week after a powerful storm drenched much of southern Manitoba, farmer Curtis McRae is still dealing with extensive flooding on his property.

More than 2,000 acres of his farmland remain underwater, with floodwaters reaching two to three feet deep in some areas.

“I have not seen anything like this before,” said McRae, who farms near Clandeboye, Man., about 50 kilometres north of Winnipeg.

“This is a once in a lifetime event.”

The storm dumped extraordinary amounts of rain across the region, including 255 millimetres in the Stonewall area.

The downpour also brought at least two confirmed tornadoes to the province and resulted in thousands of people losing power for more than 24 hours.

McRae was in the middle of seeding when the storm hit. With water expected to remain on his fields for at least another week, he fears the damage will devastate this year’s crop.

“I don’t even know if I will have 50 per cent of the crop I should have,” he said.

The financial toll is expected to be severe.

“Epically huge. Unbelievable,” he said.

Although he has crop insurance, he still expects significant losses.

“Probably around $500,000,” he said. “There is a good chance I don’t get paid this year.”

The effects could extend well beyond this growing season. McRae said reduced income will make it difficult to purchase inputs for next year’s crop, while restoring flood-damaged fields will require substantial time and money.

‘We won’t have the income to buy inputs, so that’ll be tough,” he said. “Just getting the soil ready for next year is going to be a big challenge and will cost a lot of money to do it, more so than if we would have grown a crop.”

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids