N.S. Farmers Skirt Disaster But Face Worrying Future
HALIFAX – Post-tropical storm Fiona dealt significant damage to Nova Scotia’s agriculture industry over the weekend. But many farmers, flush with fresh memories of Hurricane Dorian, are relieved that things weren’t worse.
Fiona surged into Nova Scotia early Saturday morning, bringing with it 179-kilometre-per-hour winds and as much as 200 millimetres of rain.
The record-breaking storm knocked out power to half of the province and left a trail of devastation behind it. Some regions fared much better than others but many Nova Scotia farms suffered significant damage.
Tim Marsh is a farmer and the president of the Nova Scotia Federation of Agriculture. He tells Huddle the western end of the province made out “more or less OK” but that many farmers in the east were hit hard.
He says he’s talked to farmers who saw their barns collapse, the roofs ripped off their buildings, or their crops flattened.
The storm doesn’t appear to have been selective in its destruction, either; Marsh says Fiona damaged crops of all types.
“I think it’s just where you happen to be located and the way the wind hit and the direction of the winds,” he says. “Farmers are going to be significantly impacted across commodities and types.”
However, Marsh says there is a general sense of relief among many farmers that things weren’t worse. Many still vividly remember 2019, when Hurricane Dorian devastated the province’s agriculture industry.
Marsh says that, compared to Dorian, Fiona was surprisingly mild.
It also helped that farmers were better prepared to handle Fiona, having learned their lessons from Dorian. Marsh and many other farmers worked overtime in the days leading up to the story to harvest as much of their crops as they could so they could save them from possible damage.
“I think we’re better prepared this time because of the Dorian. I think people had a better understanding of just how intense these storms are becoming and they’re going to become even more intense,” he says.
Apple growers escape Dorian-like damage
Some of the farmers potentially most vulnerable to Fiona were Nova Scotia’s apple growers.
Emily Lutz is the executive director of the Nova Scotia Fruit Growers Association. She points out that Fiona hit at peak crop season, when trees were “loaded with fruit” that was “just looking for a reason to fall on the ground.”
She says the past few days have been busy and stressful for apple farmers but admits “the outcomes were so much less serious than we were expecting and predicting.”
It’s too early to get a full read on the damage but she guesses the worst-hit areas lost 20-30 percent of their crops. That’s compared to the 80 percent losses many experienced in 2019.
Lutz is a seventh-generation member of Lutz Family Farm, which grows apples and peaches. She vividly remembers the carnage Dorian wrought.
“I remember on our farm seeing rivers of water running down the orchard roads carrying fruit. There was so much water and all the fruit was on the ground being washed down the hill and there were piles of apples at the bottom of the rows, like piles of thousands of dollars worth of apples.
“So I think, by comparison, people are feeling very relieved.”
Apple farmers are also lucky because the fruit that falls to the ground can still be salvaged.
Drops won’t fetch the same price as fresh-picked apples, but farmers can still sell lower-grade fruit for things like cider and juice.
It was also shaping up to be a banner year for the valley apple crops, so Lutz says, overall, things turned out OK.
A troubling future
Marsh says this was one of the most expensive crop years the province had because inflation drove up input costs. He’s worried about what that will mean for farmers forced to eat the cost of Fiona’s damage.
“The cost is going to be huge,” he says.
“There’s a lot of farms that are carrying an awful lot of debt now and I’m concerned that if this is going to put any extra burden on these farms it might force them under,” he says.
Marsh says insurance companies are starting to cancel coverage and triple or even quadruple premiums as storms become more common and farming carries more and more risk.
“People talk about climate change, we in agriculture, we live it every day. We see the changes in climate,” Marsh says.
Lutz agrees that hurricanes are getting more active.
“Arthur, Jaun, Edna, Dorian—I don’t remember as a kid being able to remember the names of the hurricanes that were coming towards us,” she says.
Trevor Nichols is Huddle’s editor, based in Halifax. Send him your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].