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Another RM in southwestern Saskatchewan is ready to sound the alarm on drought conditions impacting crops.
The RM of Val Marie was the hottest spot in all of Canada earlier this week, and Reeve Larry Grant said the area can’t take three more days of the intense heat.
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“If we get two or three more days of heat, the yield is going to drop,” he explained. “What little yield we’ve got is going to drop by 60 per cent, maybe more.”
He said a typical yield for the area is 25 bushels an acre; he said most farmers will be lucky to get 10.
“At that point, it costs more to go and harvest it than what you’d get for it,” Grant said.
This comes after the RMs of Maple Creek, Fox Valley, Enterprise and Big Stick have all urged the provincial and federal governments for help.
Grant said Val Marie could be next to join.
“We’ve got an RM meeting on Tuesday next week, and it’s on the agenda,” he said.
He said farmers in the area are no strangers to drought conditions, but he doesn’t know how long they can handle another poor yield.
He said this year’s crop could determine if some farmers in the area even come back to the field.
“They will be lucky if they break even on this year’s operations; they’re probably not going to get any money for themselves,” he said. “They’ll just be paying their expenses.”
Grant said a lot of Val Marie farmers are surviving on crop insurance, and things are starting to pile up.
“Crop insurance doesn’t cover operating expenses,” he said. “In today’s market the price of fuel, fertilizer, the cost of machinery, the cost of repairs for machinery is absorbent.
“And a lot of the small to medium-sized farmers are running on used equipment, which means more repairs. Repairs have mostly doubled in the last five years in cost. I don’t know how long we can maintain this.”
Grant has been ranching just north of Val Marie for 60 years and said there is no soil moisture reserve in the area.
He said farmers are desperate for rain, and all they can do is wait.
“If it rains, we’re not going to be bad, but it’s not going to be really good either because it’s late in the year,” he said.
“But if the heat comes, like the forecast is saying, then it’s going to be a wreck.”
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