No fire in the belly - which farm field would you like?

The lead editorial in the Winnipeg Free Press yesterday commented that "After six years in office this government has no fire in its belly and no evident governing purpose."

This is clearly evident in many areas of the throne speech. But it is certainly true in agriculture. One of the huge problems this year was that wet weather wreaked havoc with farming because many fields were too wet to seed, and many fields that were seeded did very poorly because of the wet conditions. We would have expected that the government would come forward with some ideas to try to deal with such wet situations in the future. It was not there.

As I pointed out in my blog on Sept 19 and 20, fields which were tile drained, almost without exception, did dramatically better than those fields which were not tile drained. For some areas in Manitoba this is a solution. Indeed, a farmer from just west of Portage la Prairie who has invested in tile drainage and reaped the benefits was saying recently "if you are going to stay in farming here, you need to use tile drainage." Was there any mention of tile drainage in the throne speech? No. Was there even any vision for how to improve water management and reduce risks to farmers? No.

The bottom photo shows a field on tile drained land north-west of Portage la Prairie with a good crop of canola. The middle photo shows a very poor canola crop growing immediately on the other side of a small farm lane from the top photo on land which was not tile drained - and only about 40 feet from the field shown at the bottom. The top photo shows another field seeded to canola which was not on tile drained land. The field has more weeds than canola, and was not worth harvesting. Tile drainage may not be a panacea, but it can sure make a difference - and when there are approaches which can make such a big difference we should have a government which is ready to understand better what is happening with Manitoba agriculture and provide a better vision for the future.