Photo credit: Stephen Linton/Dreamstime

By Curtis Galbraith

Agriculture

Officials frustrated after County of Grande Prairie left out of 2023 AgriRecovery program for livestock producers

Nov 29, 2023 | 12:00 PM

County of Grande Prairie officials say a letter of concern is going to various government officials after the county was left out of the 2023 AgriRecovery program for livestock producers.

Reeve Bob Marshall says while it was a relatively good year for cereal, pea, and canola crops, the hay crops were hurt by dry weather and smoke.

“Hay crops were significantly under what they normally are, which is impacting our livestock producers.”

“The federal program, and this is my understanding, the federal program that came down with the province was, basically, they picked a drought map that they looked at… I don’t know (if) they actually looked at what happened on the ground in the affected areas.”

Marshall says municipalities to the north like Saddle Hills County were included. He says this doesn’t make sense as producers a mile from the boundary on the county side were left out of the program.

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He adds producers in neighbouring municipalities getting $150 a head for help buying feed, while county ones do not, leaves them at a financial disadvantage.

“Everybody is going to be looking for feed. It’s not just the livestock producers within the county, it’s all in the north here because the vast majority of the hay crops were impacted significantly.”

Marshall says good hay crops for county producers were the exception, not the norm.

He adds the county declaring an agricultural disaster would not have made a difference.

He says there isn’t much hope anything will change.

“We talked to the provincial side and even the provincial minister had pushed against (the) federal (government) to look at this differently. From my understanding, that went nowhere.”

The letter of concern has been sent to the federal and provincial agriculture ministers, local MP’s and MLA’s, Rural Municipalities of Alberta, Ag. Services Boards of Alberta, and the Alberta Association of Ag. Fieldman.