Thanks, Larry.
Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before the standing committee to talk about the agricultural disaster relief programs.
My name is Brian Gilroy. I'm an apple farmer located just south of Meaford, Ontario, which is located in your chair's riding. I am also the chair of the Ontario Apple Growers and the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers' Association.
It was August 20, 2009, and the Ontario fruit and vegetable growers had just completed a two-day summer meeting that included an extensive tour of the area, highlighting the unique climate we enjoy in the bay. There had been reports of tornado sightings in the area, and at about 8 p.m. I received a call from a friend saying that another friend's son's farm had just been hit by a tornado. I quickly gathered some food, drink, and flashlights and drove to the scene.
The tornado had gone through the area at around five o'clock, and the damage to the buildings, trees, hydro lines, etc., directly in its path was unbelievable. The fellow's farm that I went to try to help out with...he'd just purchased it that spring. When the tornado touched down there, it was classified as an F2, but when I did some reading on tornadoes, it in fact picked up speed and was at an F3 velocity when it hit his farm.
It picked up a 100- by 200-foot pig barn off its footings and dropped it 100 feet further up. It picked up two school buses and twisted them up in the air. One landed where the pig barn used to be and one landed over in the orchard. It was about a kilometre wide where it went through, and it was just like a war zone. Debris was flying about. There was a brand-new stone house. Pieces of apple bins that had been picked up went through every window in the building and tore parts of the roof off. It was just unbelievable. I don't know whether you folks have ever been to a tornado site before, but it's pretty hard to fathom. It picked up a grain bin from one farm and deposited it two kilometres away in the middle of an apple orchard.
Needless to say, the damage was extensive. It destroyed a little over 100 acres of orchard through a number of different growers' places. It affected approximately 15 apple farmers in the area, 12 seriously. About six received devastating damage.
Right away, by August 25, we'd organized a meeting with all the affected growers and some of the political leaders in the area. Jim Wilson, our MPP, and a representative from Helena Guergis' riding came together with the provincial Agricorp people and talked about what kind of help and assistance could be made available to them.
It became clear that there were a number of steps that needed to be taken before AgriRecovery could be applied for. Right away, an Ontario disaster relief assistance program application was made by the affected municipalities. It was a pool application that was applied for. That allowed us to do some fundraising that leveraged provincial money; for every dollar raised from local fundraising, two dollars were matched by the province. That was one of the steps that was required to access AgriRecovery.
The crop insurance people were very helpful, as helpful as they could be. One thing that Ontario has is a tree loss program for orchards. It's offered free, but it also has a 7.5% minimum threshold. You have to lose more than 7.5% of your trees—it's sort of a deductible—before you can make any claim at all. And if you're a grower with more than one site, and this was the only site affected, it could mean that you would absolutely receive nothing for very serious losses.
One of the first things I recommended that we do was to get a hold of the Mennonite disaster relief people, who were there the very next day with close to 50 people, helping and gathering up all the debris and stuff that had flown around. They were an incredible help in allowing people to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
When you're faced with debris and tree limbs and stuff everywhere, it's pretty hard to be hopeful. These people were in a state of shock, and one of our long-time apple growers—we call him “The Thinker”, because he's such a methodical man when it comes to dealing with things—was affected as badly, if not worse, than anyone else. I've never seen him so low, and I mean low and just about out of it.
When I researched what had happened before, when an orchard had been hit by a tornado like this, basically the farmers went out of business. I'm pleased to report that because of the assistance that ODRAP crop insurance and AgriRecovery were able to provide, none of the farmers affected will go out of business because of this event.
When I talked with people, they said they had received their AgriRecovery assistance as of the end of October. So it was about 15 months after the event that they received compensation from AgriRecovery. A lot of people felt that was a long time, but I tried to convince them that when dealing with three levels of government, having the payment in that period of time was a pretty positive thing.
Am I getting close to my 10 minutes?