Charlie
Poster (center), assistant commissioner with the Minnesota Department
of Agriculture, leads a discussion Thursday with more than 50 people at
the Countryside Restaurant west of Bemidji about state and federal
programs that reimburse farmers for livestock losses due to wolf attacks
and extreme weather. (Monte Draper | Bemidji Pioneer)
BEMIDJI -- More than 50 people,
most of them ranchers and farmers, gathered in Bemidji on Thursday to
hear how the government can compensate them when their cattle are killed
by predators, mainly wolves.
The Minnesota
Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Farm
Service Agency hosted the town hall meeting to explain state and federal
programs that reimburse livestock losses due to wolves, avian raptors
and weather.
The meeting room inside the Countryside
Restaurant west of town on U.S. Highway 2 was so cramped with interested
people that at some points of the talk, attendees were forced to stand
outside the room and watch through a doorway. U.S. Rep. Collin Peterson
and several state legislators attended a similar meeting earlier
Thursday in Roseau.
In December, a federal court ruling
required gray wolves, also known as a timberwolves, be placed back on
the endangered species list. Again afforded protections guaranteed by
the Endangered Species Act, the ruling makes it illegal to kill the
wolves unless a human is in immediate danger.
Normally,
the MNDA compensates livestock producers for damage caused by wolves
following an investigation by a Department of Natural Resources
official. However, the money used for that compensation was tapped out
in 2014.
In 2012 and 2013, the department was
appropriated $150,000 per year by the Legislature to the fund for elk
and wolf damage claims. For 2014 and 2015, that appropriation decreased
to $100,000 per year. The total value of wolf claims in 2014 exceeded
funding by about $9,000.
Charlie Poster, an assistant
commissioner with the state ag department, said Thursday that was due an
increase both in the volume of attack claims and in the value of each
farm animal killed.
“Claims are kind of at the high end
of what they’ve been the past 20 years… but the value of the animals
has been so much higher than has been over the past 20 years, it’s
depleted the fund,” he said.
Poster said Gov. Mark
Dayton intends to double the amount of money to $400,000 in the
compensation program over the next biennium.
In
addition to MNDA’s compensation program, there’s a new federal
compensation program implemented under the 2014 Farm Bill that gives out
payments for attacks by legally protected predators, as well as extreme
weather events. The Livestock Indemnity Program, or LIP, generally
gives out less money per head of cattle than the state-level program but
there’s more leeway with reporting requirements. For example, the
Minnesota program requires a rancher to notify authorities within 48
hours of a kill, but under LIP, the rancher can wait up to 30 days.
The
program is administered through the local offices of the USDA’s Farm
Service Agency. Ranchers can’t “double dip,” and get full compensation
for the same incident from both the USDA and the MNDA. However,
officials advised them to file for both anyway in order to maximize
chances to get a claim awarded.
Rancher James E.
Johnson of Gonvick, Minn., said his beef herd has sustained multiple
attacks from wolves or coyotes. In some cases, the predators have gone
after calves being born -- ripping out the organs of the mother and
causing her to die by hemorrhage as well. He’s worried about coyotes and
coyote-wolf hybrids, whose attacks aren’t eligible for compensation.
He’s also upset with what he sees as government red tape. “I don’t even have time to be here now,” he said of the town hall. “You gotta go through all this rigmarole, it’s frustrating.”
The
2013 Minnesota wolf population was estimated to be 2,211 animals — 700
less wolves than in 2007, according to the DNR’s annual wolf survey for
2013.
This report included information from the Grand Forks Herald.
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