Manitoba's Agriculture Minister says the province is condensing and assessing recommendations from an agriculture risk management review task force.

The task force, appointed in last January, spent the past year to looking at ways to update current ag programming to deal with a changing climate. Its report released last week is made up of 25 recommendations, which include suggestions to consider reforming AgriInvest and continue developing the excess moisture insurance program.

Ron Kostyshyn says in responding to the report, they don't have a calendar timeline on how they'll be taking action, but says they will continue doing more work for the insurance-based programs.

"We will be talking to the experts in crop insurance and trying to massage whether it's even practical," he says, "we need to get an understanding from the federal government as well, as far as this report goes, on their thoughts because the federal government is also a key financial contributor to the insurance-based programs."

Two days after the report came out, the province announced it would be expanding a chain of automated weather stations to provide farmers with more decision-making information in the midst of a changing climate. This expanded network will measure air temperature, relative humidity, rainfall, wind speed and direction, and soil temperature, but will also collect data for flood and drought forecasting, precipitation maps, and severe weather monitoring.

Twenty-three weather stations are to be added by 2018.