P.E.I. farmers building back better as they move on from Fiona's damage
'We can't plan for today. We have to plan for 10 years down the road, 20 years down the road'
This is part two in the CBC P.E.I. series Changed by Fiona, exploring the impact the post-tropical storm will have on the Island's people and industries moving forward. Links to the other three pieces appear at the bottom of this story.
Wade Bryanton says he'll never forget the sight and sound of the barn collapsing on his cows at 3:30 a.m. on Sept. 24, 2022.
The 35-year-farming veteran from Tiny Acres Holsteins in Belmont Lot 16 said he never thought he'd see a storm as powerful as post-tropical storm Fiona.
"I basically heard a big bang, which was the doors failing on the front of the building," he said.
"It just started taking the whole wall system completely out and lifting it straight up above into the centre of the barn, dropping it down on the cows, which was just horrific to watch." Dozens of animals died.
The Bryantons' position on a peninsula in Prince Edward Island's Malpeque Bay made them particularly susceptible to strong winds from the north, and Fiona was generating northerly gusts of up to 100 kilometres per hour. They had two buildings collapse that night.
Both barns have since been rebuilt while the family maintained an active dairy operation — literally working and building around the cows.
The Bryantons are among the Island farmers who took the opportunity to make upgrades to increase their climate resiliency.
"We have a generator system basically that runs everything together, and having the power underground now will help us get to that next level of just no interference with downed lines," Bryanton said.
"It certainly makes everything work smoother for the long term."
Bracing for future Fiona-like storms
The dairy operation integrated automated robotic milking machines in the rebuilt barns, which include additional supports on the exterior to brace the large, open-air buildings in high winds.
How many farmers are vulnerable to climate change? We're all vulnerable. Everybody on Prince Edward Island is vulnerable to climate change.— Donald Killorn, P.E.I. Federation of Agricultre
The Bryantons also installed fans to keep the cows cooler in summer heat.
"As the summers get hotter and hotter, and we seem to get more of these occurrences with heat waves and things like that, that was one of the things that we felt was very necessary for the comfort of the cows, [to] help them be more adaptable to what's coming as well," he said.
The P.E.I. Federation of Agriculture says farms across the Island are making similar changes.
"There's no question that our farmers are well aware of the increasing impacts of climate change on their operations. It's important that we build resilience, we build adaptive capacity, so we have to ensure our farmers and our farm operations are strong enough to withstand these impacts," said executive director Donald Killorn.
"We can't plan for today. We have to plan for 10 years down the road, 20 years down the road."
Crops versus the elements
Fiona touched the farming sector in almost every way. Winds blew down buildings and damaged crops, rainwater and ocean storm surge flooded some fields, and strong waves eroded coastal farmland.
"There was a lot of shoreline damage on our farm," said Bryanton, who also farms crops on his 700 acres to feed the cows.
"A lot of debris and everything was pushed up on the fields, so we got that basically tidied up last fall with some help from some other people as well as ourselves. We kept on top of it all as much as we could."
The federation and the P.E.I. Potato Board both said farmers did a lot of cleanup through the winter and spring, but many are still cleaning up. They're clearing debris from their fields, shoring up buffer areas and replanting hedgerows — the strips of trees separating individual fields that can reduce soil loss from wind erosion.
"We're really fortunate, last year, that we had exceptional weather for the month after Fiona," said Greg Donald, the potato board's general manager.
"[Fiona] probably delayed harvest by about a week, but when all is said and done, we probably finished harvest on time or a little earlier, because the weather was so good afterwards."
Donald said the potato growers were lucky. Although some experienced damage to their buildings and had parts of their fields flooded, most of the crop survived the high winds because the plants grow low to the ground and the potatoes themselves develop beneath the surface.
Learning in loss
The province's tree-fruit growers were not so lucky.
"We've lost over 100,000 trees on P.E.I., so it's been pretty devastating because those trees take years to bring back into production," said Geoff Boyle, owner of The Grove Orchard and U-Pick and president of the tree-fruit industry association.
"We'll start the process this year of replanting new trees … we're committed to getting the orchard back to the way it was — and hopefully better."
Boyle lost 3,000 trees — scattered throughout different rows around the orchard.
The trees' shallow root systems coupled with the timing of Fiona's arrival — early fall, while the trees were heavy with ripe fruit and the ground was soft from rain earlier in the week — made for a regrettably perfect target. Trees snapped or were yanked from the ground.
Boyle has about 10,000 trees left, but he said the loss is still huge when you consider the time, money and hard work invested in raising all those downed trees to a fruit-producing age.
Fiona taught the fruit growers some lessons too.
Their shallow roots mean the trees require the support of trellises to withstand winds, especially during big storms. But Boyle said many growers saw those structures fail during Fiona.
"Anybody that used pressure-treated posts throughout their orchard, to my knowledge, didn't see any failure at all. But the metal posts — under the strain and pressure with the trees loaded with fruit, a number of them collapsed," he said.
"We can… make that system more robust in the future by supplementing with pressure-treated posts along the way.
"If you do that, basically the chances of coming through a storm similar to Fiona in the future would be much better."
Not going back
As the farmers get ready for this growing season, they are still dealing with ongoing Fiona cleanup. It's also the time to plant crops, let livestock back into the fields to graze, and pick up and move onwards.
While it may seem challenging to look for silver linings, farmers and industry leaders agree that Fiona showed people the power of natural disasters and how preparedness can make a difference.
And the industry will never go back to how it was before.
Fiona was a well-placed blow from Mother Nature.— Donald Killorn
"Fiona was a well-placed blow from Mother Nature," Killorn said. "Certainly the odds of us being struck like that is not a certainty … but the question of how many farmers are vulnerable to climate change? We're all vulnerable. Everybody on Prince Edward Island is vulnerable to climate change.
"We haven't yet begun to adapt to climate change in a meaningful way on Prince Edward Island.
"We have come to terms with it. We've realized that. But the work of adapting has just begun."
Other stories in this series:
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