Pressure is on to assess unharvested 2016 crops
Planting season clock ticks as province agrees to expedite crop insurance claims
Renn Breitkreuz calls it a “nightmare-style” harvest.
Last fall, the grain farmer near Onoway watched as snow settled on his fields, rendered impassable by summer rain. Unable to drive equipment on the muddy field without damaging it, the early winter weather trapped nearly 15 per cent of his crop beneath a layer of snow.
“The last time we left crop out was before I was born … so it’s unprecedented in my farming career,” Breitkreuz said. “I hope it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing and I don’t have to deal with it again.”
As soggy conditions drag into the spring planting season, agriculture groups are calling on the province to streamline the crop insurance claims process after one of the worst harvest seasons in decades.
Farmers near Edmonton were among the hardest hit by an early snow that left nearly one million acres of unharvested crops lying in fields across Alberta, four crop commissions said this week.
Under pressure from the barley, canola, wheat and pulse producers, the provincial government has agreed to expedite crop insurance claims. But the opposition Wildrose is accusing NDP Agriculture Minister Oneil Carlier of “dithering” for months.
Maps released by the Agriculture Financial Services Corp. (AFSC) this week paint a more detailed picture of which areas were hardest hit.
In all, 960,000 acres across the province went unharvested. The past three years averaged just 23,000 unharvested acres.
Of the seven counties with the most severe losses, between 38,501 and 53,000 unharvested acres, six were in the Edmonton area — Barrhead, Lamont, Two Hills, Beaver, Camrose and Flagstaff counties.
Leduc, Parkland and Sturgeon counties, which border Edmonton, had between 12,501 and 38,500 unharvested acres.
Team Alberta, a group of the province’s four crop commissions, said in a news release Wednesday that farmers face the “near-impossible” in having to make crop
With a million acres to be assessed and only (120) adjusters in the province, that’s going to take some time, and that’s time we don’t necessarily have.
insurance claims, clear last year’s harvest and seed fields in a span of six weeks.
Ward Toma, general manager at the Alberta Canola Producers Commission, said with snow falling in April, farmers have no time to lose.
While it’s not uncommon to see snow in April, “it has not necessarily happened where some farmers in the Edmonton region still have almost their entire crop from the previous year still sitting in the fields waiting to be harvested,” he said.
Jason Lenz, a barley farmer from northwest of Red Deer, said many farmers are waiting on claims adjusters to inspect their fields before starting on this year’s crop.
“Once there’s an assessment done in the field and a determination from the province that we can write off some of these crops, that’s what gets the ball rolling for us,” Lenz said.
After announcing the appointment of a new AFSC board Thursday, minister Carlier said crop inspectors would speed up the claims process by forgoing certain types of sampling and visual inspections of damaged crops.
Wildrose MLA Dave Schneider, the party’s shadow agriculture and forestry minister, said that doesn’t go far enough. He accused the minister of “dithering” in a news release Thursday, saying the AFSC should do “blanket” assessments of the hardest-hit areas.
But in a statement, the AFSC said it has already paid out the majority of crop claims. Claims have been paid for more than 696,000 acres, around 94 per cent of the total, to the tune of $33.1 million.
“I think the numbers speak for themselves — that the vast majority of those payments for unharvested acres have been paid out,” Carlier said in response to the Wildrose criticism.
Lenz said there are enough farmers still waiting for claims that the province should allow “geographic” writeoffs instead of field-byfield assessments.
“That’s something we’ve stressed (to the province) for at least a couple months now,” he said. “With a million acres to be assessed and only (120) adjusters in the province, that’s going to take some time, and that’s time we don’t necessarily have any more.”