Bart Guyon has a close relationship with his farm animals, making it much harder to leave them.
But as years of drought continues on the Prairies, farmers like Guyon are faced with the difficult choice of reducing their herds or selling.
“Especially if you’ve ever bottle-fed any animal, you become quite attached to your animal and it’s quite difficult,” she said.
A man in Brazeau County, Alta., raises bison, elk and cattle on his roughly 6,500-acre ranch, but in the past few years he has reduced his bison herd from 30 to about 100 and his cattle from about 50 to 25. The elk herd ranges from 60 to about 25.
Farmer Bart Guyon has about 100 bison left after selling 30 recently. (Peter Evans/CBC)
“We are reducing them based on the fact that we are having a harder time in production.” [feed] Except for this farm,” Guyon said, adding that water sources, such as a nearby stream, have also dried up.
“I’m talking about dust.”
Guyon is not alone.
Thorsby Stockyards owner and auctioneer Chance Martin said the last year and a half had been busy as farmers reduced their herds and failed to replace them.
A cattle auction is held at Thorsby Stockyards every Monday throughout the year. (Kory Siegers/CBC)
“If they don’t buy more grass or buy more land, of course, everyone as a whole is reducing their herd. A percentage, some of them, just got away with it.”
He said some farmers may have already considered selling for other reasons, such as lack of fodder, but drought was the catalyst that pushed them over the edge.
Martin worries about the bigger problems that reducing herds will bring.
“As we go through these cycles of drought and people start destroying their herds, it harms food security in Canada and around the world.
“This is very worrying. So, basically the weather determines everything [agriculture] industry, it really is.”
long drought
Drought has affected parts of the Prairies over the past few years, said John Pomeroy, Canada Research Chair in Water Resources and Climate Change at the University of Saskatchewan.
Pomeroy said the drought became “really severe” last year as seasonal snowpack melted roughly a month early on the Prairies, mountains and in the North, contributing to hot, dry conditions in the summer.
Researcher John Pomeroy examines a weather station near the Troll Falls Trailhead near Canmore, Alta. (Justin Pennell/CBC)
“[That] “It’s thrown us into extraordinary drought conditions in some places, once-in-a-lifetime drought,” he said.
He said soil moisture levels were hundreds of millimeters below where they should be, while snowpacks were 150 to 200 millimeters below normal.
Although parts of the Prairies have seen heavy snowfall recently, this will not be enough.
“This helps, but it still doesn’t get us back to normal conditions,” he said.
“We will need above-normal snowpacks to break the drought and ensure reasonable water supply for irrigation and downstream cities.”
Concerns are growing about Alberta’s drought conditions; The state in particular is still reeling from last year’s historic bushfire season, which burned nearly 2.2 million hectares.
The state is readying wildfire resources with an additional 100 firefighters and a $2 billion contingency fund for disasters and emergencies proposed in its last budget.
hope for spring
Trevor Hadwen is an agro-climatologist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. (Will Draper/CBC)
Trevor Hadwen, agro-climatologist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, said the drought has slowly increased over time and its effects continue.
“We lost about a year of snow due to three years of drought,” he said.
“I don’t think we can recover this spring.”
Instead, he said, he hopes moisture will accumulate in the soil, allowing crops to be produced and rains will fall on time throughout the season.
He said the changing climate is leading to more droughts and extreme weather conditions.
Bart Guyon recently installed a water tank to help collect water on his farm. (Peter Evans/CBC)
Farm owner Guyon is doing his best to alleviate the situation.
He set up water tanks, dragged hoses to the nearby stream, and installed water troughs to collect as much water as possible.
“Most farmers are pretty resilient. They usually find a way to overcome obstacles and make it work,” Guyson said.
He is hopeful that the measures he has taken will be sufficient, but acknowledges that things are in Mother Nature’s hands.
“You have no water, you have no life. And water is absolutely vital to everything, whether it’s plants, animals, people.”