Pasture insurance helps farmers manage dry conditions

In farming there are the things you can control – your crop and commodity choices, management decisions, risk management choices – and then there are the things you can’t control.

Like the weather and growing conditions.

Farmers and ranchers have always been subject to the whims of weather. From late springs to early falls and too little rain to too much, Alberta’s producers have had to find ways to manage their risks to survive and thrive.

Over the past few years, Alberta has experienced a more unsettled weather pattern, one which has led to drier than normal conditions in many areas of the province. These dry conditions left livestock producers scrambling for pasture and winter feed and resulted in two AgriRecovery initiatives – the 2021 Canada-Alberta Livestock Feed Assistance Initiative and the 2023 Canada-Alberta Drought Livestock Assistance initiative.

“My wife and I joke all the time that every ranch should be called The Next Year Ranch, cuz, you know, it’s always in conversation, ‘Well, next year this will be better, next year that will be better,’” says Trevor Liboiron, who runs a 250 head cow-calf operation in the Jenner area.

“You have to have that hope for next year, that it’s going to be better, you just keep carrying on.”

But without risk management, getting to that next year can be challenging. Agriculture Financial Services (AFSC) offers a variety of insurance and income stabilization options to help producers navigate risks and give them peace of mind.

This year, for Liboiron, that peace of mind came from AFSC’s Moisture Deficiency Insurance (MDI).

“We’ve used the Moisture Deficiency program, I believe, for three years now,” explained Liboiron. “This year was, well, basically immeasurable rain – we didn’t have any rain this year.

“With the Moisture Deficiency program, it was able to pay us out some money to, you know, get feed for the cattle and be able to basically survive another year.”

It’s a similar story for Curt Hale of Maverick Livestock Company Ltd. Hale, along with his wife, sons, and grandsons, runs between 1,200 to 1,400 cows in the Fairview area.

“This is our first year for the MDI program,” explained Hale. “It’s helped us tremendously to get through this time of tough feed prices, shortage of feed. Without it, we would have been a lot worse shape than we’re in, so we’re really thankful that we had it this year.”