Prairie farmers say they're fighting a losing battle against a cute but voracious pest — the gopher.

The small rodent has long been a part of life on the Prairies, but their numbers have gone up dramatically since the federal government banned the use of a potent pesticide — liquid strychnine

Parts of southwestern Saskatchewan are overrun with gophers, farmers say.
CBC

Roland Schafer, a farmer in southwestern Saskatchewan, says the pests — technically named Richardson's ground squirrels — are eating up profits and threatening the farmers' futures.

Schafer has been doing a lot of gopher-shooting lately, but says it isn't making much of a dent on his Mankota-area farm. The ground is shimmering with the bodies of thousands of rodents — squeaking, chasing each other and mating.

'It's that bad. When our income on this farm has been nil for four years, it's not going to keep us going for very much longer.'—Saskatchewan farmer Les Jordet

It wasn't always like this, Schafer says. At one time, when a typical farm had a few quarter-sections of land and farm families were larger, it was a simple matter to send everybody out with a pail of liquid strychnine and take care of the critters in one pass.

"The gophers were gone," he said. "But now everybody's got thousands of acres and don't have time to manage them right."

As well, liquid strychnine was banned in the early 1990s  because the poison also killed the animals that eat gophers, including hawks, foxes and weasels.

It was a replaced with a less potent version that farmers say is ineffective.

Not far from where Schafer was picking off gophers, Les Jordet was pulling a cultivator behind his tractor to fill in his gopher holes and even bigger badger holes. Some of the holes are so big, they can swallow a tractor tire, Jordet said.

He can't get crop insurance, because his land is considered over-grazed by the gophers. They eat the grass down to the roots, and what should be a green field is turning brown.

"It's that bad," he said. "When our income on this farm has been nil for four years, it's not going to keep us going for very much longer."

The infestations have caught the attention of the federal government, which has hired wildlife biologist Gilbert Proulx to test various poisons on test plots in southwest Saskatchewan.

Proulx isn't sure poison is the answer.

"Maybe it's time to think outside the box and come up with something that will bring down the species in numbers without causing the elimination of the population," he said.

Jordet is hopeful that the test plots on his farm may lead to a solution, but in the short term farmers need something that works, he says — even if it's the old strychnine.

No one has a bigger stake in preserving the land than those who make a living from it, Jordet said.

However, that's becoming hard to do with all the gophers, he said.

The federal government estimates the damage from gophers at $200 million a year on the Prairies. That doesn't include the money farmers spend to control the gopher population.