ENVIRONMENT-CANADA: Western Farmers Battered by Worst-Ever Drought

By Stephen Leahy Reprint | | Print |

Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Ontario, Aug 14 2002 (IPS) - Canadian farmers on tiny, green Prince Edward Island are stacking bales of their fresh-cut hay onto rail cars and shipping them 5,000 kilometres to feed hungry cattle in dusty Alberta and Saskatchewan, suffering their worst droughts in history.

The hay, donated by hundreds of sympathetic farmers in wetter, eastern Canada, is being given to needy ranchers on a lottery basis, but it will not be nearly enough to feed the herds that make up 65 percent of the beef cattle in Canada.

While farmers and leaders of the two western prairie provinces scramble to shore up the industry, many observers say the drought is a sure sign of climate change produced by global warming, and a new report says drier days loom this century.

Ironically, Alberta Premier Ralph Klein is leading the fight against Canada ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, an international deal to cut the gases that scientists say produce global warming. He says Alberta’s oil and gas industries would be devastated by the move.

Alberta farmers have sent hundreds of thousands of cows and calves to slaughter in recent weeks because they have no feed. At least 25 percent more animals than usual have been sold, and farmers say that number is increasing weekly.

Rancher Dale Greig of Barrhead, Alberta will be taking his steer calves to market this week, months before they are ready. “We used to produce a surplus of feed to sell. But not for the past three years,” says Greig.

Today, the farmer doesn’t have enough to feed his own animals.

While this is the third year of extreme heat and dry conditions, the drought has spread this year, hitting 75 percent of Alberta and a major part of Saskatchewan.

If conditions do not improve, Greig is faced with selling off all his animals, including his breeding herd of 150 cows that he has carefully built over 30 years. “I’m 57 years old, I’ll never be able to get back into cattle again,” he says.

The farmer estimates that without some late summer rain, he will have to spend more than 20 thousand U.S. dollars to buy feed for his cattle over the winter.

“The trainloads of hay from the east are great. But we need at least 100 times the amount they’re sending.”

Transporting high volumes of feed over long distances is prohibitively expensive and some ranchers have opted to ship their cattle hundreds of kilometres away to regions where there is some pasture. But in an industry where margins are slim, that additional expense means selling animals at a loss, says Greig.

But many farmers are worse off, he adds, and have already sold their entire herds.

The drought is drying up more than the cattle industry. Soaring feed prices are also hurting chicken and hog farmers. The heat has also killed thousands of chickens and hogs as ventilation systems in barns struggle to keep temperatures low.

Production of wheat and barley, the two main crops, will drop at least 30 percent, and even honey producers are anticipating poor yields.

The Great Plains region in the United States is also living through the same three-year dry period.

Even if rain comes this fall it will be too late for many farmers.

Like last year, this drought will knock at least three billion dollars from the farm economy in western Canada, says Environment Minister David Anderson.

Governments are helping: Alberta has committed 207 million dollars, Saskatchewan 45 million dollars and the federal government will assist as well, but did not offer a specific figure. Many farmers have crop insurance to offset extremely low yields.

“It all helps but it won’t be enough,” says Ron Glazier of the Alberta Cattle Commission. The Canadian cattle industry will survive, he says, but some ranchers will be bankrupt.

Environment Minister Anderson puts the blame squarely on climate change. According to most scientists, human-produced emissions of greenhouse gases, primarily from burning oil, coal and natural gas, are changing the planet’s climate and have raised global temperatures nearly one degree centigrade.

A Canadian report released this week says climate change in Canada will produce many more droughts and dry up many of the country’s northern lakes over the next 100 years. The paper, ‘Climate Change, Impacts and Adaptation: A Canadian Perspective’, also predicts more frequent and intense heat waves, especially in western Canada.

The report warns that warming temperatures could shrink the supply of snow-melt-generated freshwater in the summer – a crucial supply of water for farm irrigation in southern Alberta.

Across southern Canada, the amount of that water flowing yearly has dropped significantly in 50 years, the report says, adding, “the continuation of this trend would exacerbate water shortages that are already apparent across many areas of Alberta and Saskatchewan owing to drought”.

But climatologists remain reluctant to blame the current drought on climate change.

David Phillips, a senior climatologist at Environment Canada, acknowledges this drought is the worst ever recorded but says records only go back 135 years. It is possible there were periods in the past when it was as warm and dry, he says.