With the recent tornadoes and heavy rains in the Portage area, farmers are feeling the brunt of mother nature while they try to work their fields. Jim Murray farms 11 miles south of Portage, and says the tornadoes that hit Long Plain First Nation made their way toward his land.

"It hit the yard pretty hard. Luckily, we weren't home at the time, I said to my wife 'one of us probably would have had a heart attack trying to hide from it.' But it took most of the out-buildings out of our yard. The trees and fence-lines are a mess. But it's an ongoing thing for clean-up. I don't see the end in sight. It left my wife's plastic greenhouse. It never touched it. But all the rest of the important buildings got damaged in some way or another. I know we had one cattle shed that was 30' by 120', and if you didn't know it was there you'd think it never was. I'm thinking that's in the $50,000-plus range to rebuild that now."

Murray describes the evidence left behind from the twisters.

"You would swear it was a bouncing ball. It hit here and it hit there. You can follow the trees where the trees go down. They're good and then they're down again. You hear about it all the time, and you watch it on television, but it's a whole new ballgame when you come home to it."

If that wasn't enough, heavy rains from Monday affected several farmers as well.

"We got a real dumping on Monday night. It was three and a half inches in our rain gauge Tuesday afternoon. I was walking across the lawn and there's still water laying on the lawn. When the lawn starts to puddle, then you know it's been a lot. You won't be able to get on the fields. The ground won't carry the machinery. It's usually a week or ten days in our area before you can start to travel on there again."

Murray notes how this kind of downpour takes a toll on their equipment.

"I was away yesterday and saw a four-wheel-drive tractor sitting in the field waiting to pull the combines out. And when you start pulling a combine, that costs a lot of money. They break. They're not made for being towed. They break very badly if you pull them too hard. They're not designed to take heavy pulls."