Eyes on the sky: severe weather and your insurance

Jul 21, 2022

It’s summertime in Alberta, and with the season comes an increased potential of volatile storm activity. Depending on your insurance coverage with Agriculture Financial Services Corporation (AFSC), you may have protection against losses related to lightning strikes and accidental fires.

“Agriculture is filled with unpredictable events, including the weather,” said Ken Handford, senior product coordinator. “Alberta’s seemingly unpredictable summer weather means farmers face a risk of lightning strikes or accidental fire damaging their crops.

“However, many of AFSC’s insurance offerings include protection against losses related to lightning and accidental fire.”

Hay, Export Timothy Hay, or Annual Crop Insurance and Processing Vegetable Insurance

Clients with Hay, Export Timothy Hay, or Annual Crop Insurance and Processing Vegetable Insurance are covered when insured crops suffer production losses due to fires caused by lightning. Total production must be below their insured coverage, and losses are measured and paid at the end of the year on a post-harvest assessment.

Hail Endorsement and Straight Hail Insurance

For annual crops with Hail Endorsement coverage, clients have spot-loss coverage due to accidental fire and fire due to lightning. Annual crop or hay fields insured under Straight Hail Insurance have the same spot-loss coverage as Hail Endorsement.

Coverage ends the earliest of the following:

when the crop is harvested or put to another use,
abandoned because of no harvest value,
midnight October 31.

Clients have 14 days to report fire damage to AFSC under Hail Endorsement or Straight Hail Insurance.

Satellite Yield Insurance and Moisture Deficiency Insurance

The Spot-Loss Fire Benefit is included with Satellite Yield Insurance and Moisture Deficiency Insurance for insured pasture acres. It protects against both accidental fire and fire caused by lightning. A client must have a minimum of 100 insured pasture acres burned to qualify for compensation.

Spot-Loss Fire payments compensate clients for production losses in the current year as well as the following year, as it is recognized burned land usually takes at least two years to recover. Coverage ends February 28 of the year following the growing season. Clients must notify AFSC within 14 days of the start of the fire on pasture acres.

Reporting fire damage

When reporting fire damage, clients must provide the land location where damage occurred, number of acres damaged, date of the fire, cause of the fire and any relevant documentation from the fire department. AFSC will not pay for any fire losses in cases where those losses are recoverable from other insurance sources, or legal remedy.

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Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”