Still no word on disaster relief for marsh growers

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

by SUSAN MANN

It has been seven months since the dyke in the Horlings Marsh/Bradford area broke for a second time and there has been no word from the provincial and federal governments on whether they will provide disaster relief.

In the meantime, vegetable grower John Marques is concerned about his fields and his personal safety because the dyke that caused the flood hasn’t been fixed yet.

“I don’t feel comfortable spending another $300,000 to get a crop up and going on that particular field only to have it flood again,” he says.

Last year, two floods caused by spring rains and north winds in May and June destroyed about 130 acres of carrot and onion crops when the dyke failed. Farmers said at the time of the dyke’s second failure it was too late to establish another planting and crops for the year were lost. Marques alone lost more than $1 million in crops and dealt with damage to his equipment, crates, farm pavement and buildings.

Ontario Premier and Agriculture Minister Kathleen Wynne first put in a request to the federal government to launch a formal assessment of the situation under the AgriRecovery program last July. The program provides targeted assistance to farmers for specific disasters, such as from weather or disease, to help cover extraordinary costs for recovering from the disaster. It is jointly funded by federal and provincial governments.

In October and November, provincial government officials arrived on area farms to do testing.

Marques says he hasn’t heard anything since then.

The government silence on the issue contrasts starkly with the speed at which aid was delivered to Nova Scotia strawberry growers when their crop was devastated by a virus last summer. By December, they had received $2.3 million to help them remove plants and introduce healthy ones.

Asked what was taking so long, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada spokesman James Watson says by email “this question is best directed to the province of Ontario.”

Mark Cripps, Ontario agriculture ministry spokesman, says the Bradford Marsh flooding has required extensive soil testing to establish what effects the flooding had on the soil and how much of it was washed away before “the effects on future production can be determined.”

The ministry’s soil testing work included 800 sample locations and a comparison of a high-resolution post-flood land elevation survey to a pre-flood land elevation survey so officials could determine if the soil shifted from the flood, he explains.

A draft report by the province was forwarded this week to the federal government, he adds.

Cripps says the comparison of the Horlings Marsh flooding to Nova Scotia’s strawberry virus is unfair. “In Nova Scotia, the crops were affected by a virus. That’s a pretty cut and dried situation and it would have taken a lot less time to determine whether future production would be affected.”

In the meantime, the Ontario agriculture ministry will contribute one-third of the $1 million dyke repair costs through its drainage program. Landowners are also expected to contribute to the repairs.

Marques says there is about two kilometres of dyke to fix. Repair crews have built a roadway to get to the dyke, cleared some land and dumped some fill to support the dyke “but haven’t started the reconstruction process yet.”

He says he hopes the dyke repair will be completed soon. Lake Simcoe levels right now are even higher than what they were when the break happened. “I can't even imagine what's going to happen once all the thaw is there."

The AgriRecovery assessment in Ontario is only being done for the marsh farmers affected by the dyke break flood. But there was plenty of wet weather across the province last year that affected growers throughout Ontario.

So far, Agricorp has paid $46 million in production insurance claims for 2013 because of excess rainfall, excess moisture and/or flooding, spokesperson Stephanie Charest says by email.

And that number could end up being even higher because Agricorp isn’t finished processing all of the 2013 production insurance claims yet due to the late harvest last year. Claims will be finalized by early spring, she says.

Agricorp’s 2013 wet weather claims are way up compared to 2012 when it paid $9 million, but that was a dry year, Charest notes. Wet weather claims for 2013 are similar to 2011, another wet year, when Agricorp paid $52 million in insurance claims.  BF