A drainage issue has been brought to the attention of La Broquerie council.

Ryan Mateychuk approached council with concerns about flooding of his family's hay field along Provincial Road 302 just north of Zhoda. He estimates a $50,000 product loss in the last two years. Mateychuk says his dad bought the half section about 20 years ago and their family had been cultivating the land with no problems until two years ago.

"Last year the water was so deep," notes Mateychuk. "We contracted a guy out to come do the haying for us and he literally had to run up the field and float a few tractors in there to get to the field, to the dry area. He was able to cut about 95 acres out of 320 and then we couldn't get the hay off because there was no driveway access to the field. So we couldn't move the bales until the first week of January once the water froze enough to get a semi truck across it. This year again we were able to make about 100 acres and are faced with the same problem."

He adds if he had bought a low section of land and was asking the municipality to drain out a swamp that would be a different story, however he notes it's a high section of land where there were no issues for almost two decades.

Reeve Lewis Weiss says the municipality is looking at ways of helping Mateychuk and other residents with land drainage issues.

"So his [Mateychuk's] request was if we could build up one of the side roads a little bit it would help with his access. So it would help to get the bails and maybe even, if things work out well, it would stop a bit of the water from going onto his property."

Weiss adds council has expressed they want to meet with the Minister of Highways and discuss the multiple issues concentrated around Provincial Road 302.

Jodi Goerzen, District Manager of the Seine Rat River Conservation District, says it's very challenging right now to handle drainage because the 80's were dry and now the changing climate is creating an unpredictable wet and dry weather cycle including being able to see drought and flooding in the same season. Goerzen notes an example is a few weeks ago when Steinbach and area had four inches of rain, the Rat River came up five feet and crested three times.

"And some of the most recent research that has come out from the United Nations, actually, is talking about the polar ice caps that have been melting," explains Goerzen. "The reason why that's so important is that as they melt they actually heat the air temperature above them in the atmosphere. When the atmospheric air temperature increases it's actually able to hold 16% more moisture with every degree that it heats up."

She says this means when the atmospheric temperature is two degrees warmer it can carry 32% more water which is when catastrophic rain events happen and overwhelm the ground and infrastructure systems.