The recent drought has had an incredible impact on our agriculture. So many ranchers in the southwestern Prairies have been reducing their herds. That's also happening in B.C. and elsewhere. In the Palliser Triangle area of southwestern Saskatchewan and southern Alberta, the dryland farmers have had disastrous years for multiple years now. Irrigation was introduced to this area. One of the irrigation districts just had the announcement that it will be getting half of its normal allocation of water because of a shortage of runoff from the Rockies anticipated this year.
It is affecting food in many ways. Manitoba has experienced many years with flooding when it was impossible to get crops going. Some provinces have sometimes had flooding and drought in the same year, depending on where you were and which farms were affected. Crop insurance carries this, but crop insurance is based on averages. Long-term droughts and flooding start to decrease the benefit there, and it tends to be heavily subsidized by the rest of society. The whole thing eventually becomes untenable if we don't take some action.
With prediction, if farmers knew reliably in January what the drought situation would be, then they could plan their seeding and what they are going to do with their fields. The irrigation district could better manage what it's doing. We could reap a tremendous economic benefit and a food security benefit from this as well. That's what I'd like to see in the future.