N.S. farm owner struggling with rising cost of diesel

Many Maritime farmers are worried about the high costs of things to do their work.

Victor Oulton has a hungry herd to take care of at Oulton Farms. With diesel prices rising, the cost of feeding his animals continues to rise.

“It’s concerning for sure because we don’t know how long it could stay up, it could be and it could go higher. I don’t know,” he says.

The new year began with diesel prices sitting at 155.0 cents per litre, they’re now 211.0 cents per litre. That’s a jump of 56 cents a litre.

The rise in price is forcing Oulton to cut corners elsewhere to make his budget work.

“It’s not like it’s only a few cents it’s substantial right now,” Oulton says. “We try to as much as much as we can, but everything still needs to be fed and everything. We have mainly livestock, mainly cattle so we’re feeding at least once a day sometimes twice a day.”

Attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz has halted tanker traffic, disrupting 20 per cent of the world’s oil supply.

There doesn’t seem to be an end in sight to the United States-Israel led war with Iran. That means fuel prices could continue to climb.

“Petroleum underlies everything that we do right?” says Catherine Manning from the Nova Scotia Federation of Agriculture. “Fueling our tractors to planting our crops to even inputs into the materials that we use for packaging and that sort of thing.”

Manning says concerns over costs is difficult for farmers to deal with, especially before their busy season gets started.

“The spring is always daunting because we just come out of a drought year, so we don’t know what we’re heading into. We had floods the year before that, so it’s always daunting, so this geopolitical stuff, that’s going on just adds another layer.”

The costs add another layer of uncertainty in an already unpredictable job where costs are closely monitored by both industry and consumers.

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