DECEMBER 2017 • COUNTRY LIFE IN BC Crop insurance


claims up Two key weather events drove this year’s losses in Peace


by MYRNA STARK LEADER


DAWSON CREEK – The number of crop insurance claims for the 2017 growing season in BC’s Peace region are running well above the five-year average. By the end of October, producers had filed 60 claims for forage and 145 for grain losses. Over $4.7 million has already been paid out to grain producers this season – over four times the five-year average. Producers in the region faced a number issues this year. One was early snow in fall 2016 which meant thousands of acres needed to be harvested before the 2017 crop was planted. According to the BC


Ministry of Agriculture, two events drove grain losses through the end of October 2017. The first was excessive spring moisture that prevented seeding of 72,000 acres – about 26% of the


intended acreage – and severe hail in July that impacted 20 insured grain producers in the Dawson Creek area to the tune of $2.6 million. Fred Schneider was among


the producers hit hard by hail. “I’ve seen a lot of hail, but


I’ve never seen hail like that,” he says.


Schneider runs about 200 head of cattle and 150 yearlings at Schneider Riverside Range southeast of Dawson Creek. In addition, he backgrounds about 400 calves until spring. Cows feed mainly on hay and the calves get hay and oat or barley silage. He also farms about 3,000 acres of grain and hay. “If we have a good year, we might combine some of the grain,” says Schneider. “We did silage alfalfa grass fairly early and we were just in the middle of the haying season. On the silage land, we already


17


Dawson Creek area mixed farmer Fred Schneider says a July hailstorm lasted over 30 minutes. It started around 5 o’clock and at 10, his late seeded forage field was still covered like it had snowed, flattening everything. Hail was the size of golf balls, below. SUBMITTED PHOTOS


had nice regrowth over the knee. We were in very good shape feed-wise until the hail storm came along.” In fact, two storms


occurred in the course of a week. “The first one wasn’t too


bad. There wasn’t a lot of damage but the second one was hail like an egg,” he


explains. “The hail storm flattened everything. We went from very good shape into very poor shape. The hay land which got hit with the storm, there was nothing to hay anymore and the pasture was basically gone, too.” The storms also damaged


his grain crop. “The oats came back a little


bit but the yield is about half of what it would have been,” he says. Historically, damaging hail


hasn’t been an issue for Schneider’s mostly livestock operation, so he didn’t have insurance. This means his losses aren’t part of the 60 forage claims reported by the BC Ministry of Agriculture.


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Kimberly Ross, M.Sc. (Ag.Ec.) Director


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