Alberta’s farmers are set to break provincial records—not for crop yield, but for the number of claims they are making related to the region’s costly hailstorms.
According to the Agriculture Financial Services Corporation (AFSC), farmers in the province had filed 5,800 crop insurance claims as of July 25—5,500 of which were claims related to hail damage. These numbers, however, do not include the many other claims made following the series of hailstorms that struck central and southern Alberta the previous weekend.
“It’s been a challenging year,” AFSC spokesperson Nikki Booth said. “We are on trend to exceed 2012, which was our record hail claim year.”
In 2012, the AFSC paid out over $450 million for hail damages. Although Booth said that this year’s total is set to exceed that number, it is too early to say how it could affect payouts.
“We don’t have a dollar value that we’ve put forward as to what the hail claims could be — it depends on what the rest of the season looks like,” she mentioned.
“Just over half of our fields are 80 to 100 per cent written off. It’s pretty depressing,” farmer Jay Schultz told
Calgary Herald. Schultz’s crops were bombarded by hail the size of ping-pong balls Saturday evening—the fifth hailstorm to have struck his property this summer, but the first to actually cause considerable crop damage.
Alberta, along with the other two prairie provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, has experienced a surge in the number of tornadoes, winds, hail, and thunderstorms for this year. Experts say that of the three, Alberta was hit the hardest by severe weather events.
Environment Canada senior climatologist David Phillips noted that July was a tough month for the province, particularly in the Calgary area, where 206 millimetres of rain fell.
“It’s the wettest July in 89 years … but the other thing that really stood out for me was the number of thunderstorms,” Phillips remarked. “Calgary had 19 thunderstorms and they normally would see eight of those, and they had 43 hours with thunderstorms. It was a rock and rolling kind of month.”
Related stories:
Late June storms caused $50 million in damage in southern Alberta: Insurance Bureau of Canada
Hailstorm Alley causes millions in damage, claims
