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Land will be useless for years: farmers

Lake Manitoba flood forces cattle sell-off

By: Bill Redekop

Posted: 06/8/2011 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

Bill Redekop / Winnipeg Free Press Vogar-area rancher John Johnson says about 80 per cent of his land is under water and he believes it will be three years before his cattle will be able to return.

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LAKE MANITOBA NARROWS -- Perhaps this place needs a name change -- Lake Manitoba Widens.

Flooding is making the lake wider, and wider, and wider.

Or how about this for a new moniker: Lake Manitoba Stays. A hard-pack clay that water can't penetrate sits three feet below the land's surface here. The only way for flood waters to go is up through evaporation, meaning the land here may stay flooded until December.

But many people here think the name should be more like Lake Manitoba Plus, for the 25,000 to 30,000 cubic feet per second of water still being sent here from the Assiniboine River via the man-made Portage Diversion.

It all adds up to a final name, more like a title: Lake Manitoba Worries.

On the short term, the province has promised to pay ranchers here for their transportation costs to move cattle to other pastures, plus $100 per cow-calf pair for the pastures they stay on.

"That should take us to about the end of September," said John Johnson, who farms near Vogar.

The broader picture is this: No way cattle are coming back at the end of September. Ranchers like Johnson say it will be a minimum of three years before the water is gone and the land recovers enough for cattle to return.

That would cost the province about $500 per head per year, said Johnson. Government must decide whether it wants to make that expenditure, or facilitate a massive herd sell-off and close down the industry around the lake, he said. Many farmers are already planning to sell their herds but want tax concessions. About a third of the province's 550,000 cattle are raised around Lake Manitoba.

That's the long-term worry here. A short-term worry is whether farm roads will hold up much longer. Many sections of road are under water and deteriorating, and Lake Manitoba isn't expected to crest until July at about 816.5 feet above sea level.

That could mean farmers like Johnson and Morgan Sigurdson, near Reykjavik, who ran over and killed a carp swimming across a farm road last week, will have to get to their farms on ATVs. It means Sigurdson, who still has cattle on higher land, won't be able to get his remaining cattle out if high water reduces his pasture any further. It also means he can't get a fuel truck down the road to deliver fuel to run his farm equipment.

Sigurdson has shipped out 260 cow-calf pairs and has just 12 left.

He planned to grow a field of barley this year.

"Rice might work, not barley," said his father, Gudie.

Other worries are whether the dikes will hold. All the ranchers now have huge earthen dikes around their farmyards and many have second, sandbag dikes around their homes in case a storm tops the outer dike, which happened in last week's downpour.

Lake Manitoba used to be three kilometres away from Kevin Bjornson's farmyard. Now it's lapping against his seven-foot-high and nearly kilometre-long earthen dike.

"The waves were coming right over the top in that storm," he said.

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 8, 2011 A5

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