CALGARY- Great moisture and heat all summer meant Tony Marshall was supposed to have a great harvest. Instead, the southern Alberta farmer’s fields have been wiped out by a freak summer snowstorm.
“We missed the hailstorms that had come through, so yeah, we were looking forward to good things,” he said, while surveying the damage. “It’s flattened, and it’s going to be really tough to swath.”
His barley was supposed to become a batch of beer for a Calgary micro-brewery, but the damage means he’ll be feeding it to cattle instead.
“As a farmer you don’t really have to go to Vegas to get your risks,” he says. “It hurts, but that’s the nature of farming. Some years are good, others are not so good.”
Marshall’s neighbours with even larger operations stand to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“Because we have only maybe 15 to 20 per cent of the crop harvested in the province, this is a bigger impact than it would have been a month from now,” explains crop specialist Mark Cutts.
However, the losses likely aren’t widespread enough to prompt the price of bread or flour to rise.
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