Gophers can cost producers thousands of dollars each year.--NEWS FILE PHOTO
Producers are talking about gophers this year as they have become a huge problem.
Nichole Neubauer of Neubauer Farms said, “I wouldn’t be shocked if the numbers stayed fairly consistent but when we have no rain and the vegetation is limited, the impact of the gophers becomes so much more obvious.”
Neubauer went flying with her son on June 1 and was heartbroken to see the amount of damage that has been sustained on the prairies and grassland.
Agricultural supervisor of Cypress County Lisa Sulz said gophers are always in high abundance. The difference this year is, “the Federal Government has ended their registration for liquid strychnine because producers can’t purchase that any longer and there are concerns about what can be used instead.
“Everybody’s threshold is different depending on their crops. We get calls often about gophers and what kind of solution we can offer now that strychnine is not available.”
Gophers cause producers thousands of dollars in damage each year by feeding on the crops. They also like to follow the seed rows and dig up the seeds before they fully emerge, favouring the tender sprouts. They like the young, small sugar beet leaves, according to Kelly Van Ham, board director of the Alberta Sugar Beet Growers, and can take out an entire area quickly.
Van Ham has seen poison stations around but advised, “you must be careful with the choice of poison. By poisoning them we affect other wildlife as well, such as owls and hawks that eat the poisoned carcasses.”
Others are out trying to exterminate them using .22s with varying success.
Neubauer stated gophers are always a problem but with strychnine taken out of the producer’s toolkit and nothing available to replace it, “we are left in a state where we have no control mechanism to manage gopher populations and it impacts our ability to grow food, it truly does.”
