Agricultural disaster update for the M.D. of Taber council

By Cole Parkinson
Vauxhall Advance
cparkinson@tabertimes.com

After declaring an agricultural disaster on June 9, the Municipal District of Taber finally saw some rain throughout the rest of the month. And while that rain was a refreshing change from the dry heat the municipality has seen over the past few summers, July has returned to more usual weather patterns. M.D. administration was able to update council at their regular meeting on June 28 on where the municipality was sitting since declaring in June.

“I’ll just provide the data that we’ve used to declare with, so you can continue to see the progress through the municipality and the surrounding area through the crop report and also the moisture reports that come my way,” explained Jason Bullock, director of Ag Services.

“We must also notice these are June 14 and June 16 reports. The situation has changed – the crop condition and pasture conditions – have changed substantially in the past 10 days or so since then,” added Coun. Brian Hildebrand. “We do live in a drier area and farmers, ranchers, and agricultural producers are very cognizant that we’re never more than three weeks away from the next drought and every day brings us one day closer to the big rain. So, very fortunately we had the big rain a couple of times during the last two or three weeks, so our situation is much different than it was when we declared the agricultural disaster.”

It was also asked if there was still a need to keep the declaration in place after the earlier rainfalls.

“Do we want to keep the disaster declaration in place or is it time to remove that? Given the situation we are in, the immediacy of the crisis is no longer there. I think we’ve moved on from being in the crisis to a recovery phase now,” stated Hildebrand.

While that rain certainly helped the area, there’s still plenty of summer left. With heat expected for the next several weeks, others were in favour of keeping things in place for the time being.

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