"Even people who live in the country don't have an idea. You have to wake up every morning and look at it. It almost makes you sick to your stomach to look at crops that are drowning. And the rain keeps coming."
"You can't catch up with hay. But anything can happen in the next month. If we get a late frost, it could be fine."
Amanda O'Connell, 2,000-acre family farm, Carleton Place

"Our government is committed to supporting Ontario's farmers, and that's why we commit more than $230 million every year in business risk management programs available for growers to cover loss and damage due to risks that are beyond their control."
Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs

"Crop insurance [government program] is meant to mitigate our ordinary risk [in the farming community]. This [this year's spring and summer rainfall] is not ordinary."
"I want someone [from government] to come and see this. I don't want a photo-op. We have neighbours who are in worse shape than us. One has 175 acres that never got planted. At this point what do you plant?"
"The front of our house, there is a field that literally smells of rotting corn."
"Farmers are proud people. They don't look for a handout unless it's serious."
Shelley McPhail, farming between Almonte and Pakenham

"There is a lot of acreage that has never been planted. A lot of soybeans and corn will be ruined."
"Cows need protein. There's a lot of fibre here [hay acreage still standing, losing its nutritional value as animal feed because farmers cannot get their tractors out on flooded fields], but very little protein."
"It's so late we won't get a second or third cut [this growing season]."
Lillian Drummond, 200-acre farm near Almonte

Cows stand in a flooded field on Lillian Drummond’s farm near Almonte. Jean Levac

The Ottawa Valley, like much of the province of Ontario has been hit hard by the incessant, heavy rains that have drenched, and continue to mire arable land, forests, urban areas deep in flood. In the spring serious flooding with resulting home evacuations took place as a result of the ongoing rain. The hill behind the houses on the street we live on began slumping, taking the forested sides of the ravine down into the depths of the creek below and three houses deemed to be in danger were evacuated.

Remedial work there with the aid of engineering and construction crews has been ongoing ever since with the intention of wrapping up the work and withdrawing the cranes, bulldozers and steam shovels at the end of next month, when presumably the evacuees will be given the green light to return to their homes, which have been under 24-hour security watch all these months. The installation of steel supports going 200 feet down to bedrock that shook all the houses on the street through the period of that work is completed.

But nothing can remedy the plight that area farmers find themselves in. This is a matter that nature herself must resolve. Their cattle that once grazed in meadows now tread knee-deep in those same meadows that resemble a swamp. The land is incapable of absorbing any more rain, it is completely and beyond saturated. Crops have been rotting, any that might have been saved could not be reaped since the machinery cannot be placed out on inundated fields.

As one farmer, the director of the Lanark Federation of Agriculture put it, "What was wonderful horse hay has turned into cattle feed. We're not asking for a handout. But if you don't have crops, you won't have cattle. This is food production across the board."
"If we can't make money [farmers and others practising animal husbandry], we're gone. I have to trust our politicians to put their heads together and come up with something."

Still from video -- David Whittington, Kawarthas farmer: “No matter how old you are, we haven’t seen weather like this. Last year, we had the driest summer in a hundred years and now we have the wettest in 150 years.”